My post from Tuesday, on a highly congested intersection in Fairfax, Virginia, got some comments. Some interesting bits from a long one:

When I lived in Manhattan I still had to get the car out of the garage to go to the Asian market...in New Jersey. Even a trip for any groceries more exotic than milk and eggs required a subway ride, limiting purchases to what one can comfortably carry for a half-hour return trip that requires a free hand to access your wallet in the middle. I am much, much happier now that I do all my food shopping by car (or by delivery in Fed Ex’s trucks). Unfortunately, that tends to lead to ugly environments like the intersection of parking lots and gas stations photographed in your post.

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But I don’t see a path to getting this fixed that involves people giving up on driving. We can start by taking advantage of the opportunities electrification presents to remedy some of this ugliness: the gas stations can steadily be eliminated, for starters. Replace just a couple of those with medium-to-high density mixed-use residential and commercial buildings, maybe like the housing complex you mention, and you are at least 50% of the way towards turning an ugly intersection into an actual neighborhood.

Driving is frankly convenient and easy, given the state of transit and land use. But it results in aesthetically unpleasant landscapes that are also very infrastructure-heavy and expensive to maintain. And these landscapes, which are reasonably traversable only with a car, intensify the sense that it’s better to rely on a car. It’s tough.

Here’s part of an interesting email I received, lightly edited:

One factor that occurs to me is store size. On the one hand, at a larger grocery store, in theory, you can get it all done in one trip. On the other hand, say for many older people or anyone with bad knees, vast stores can make you wish to avoid them. Land use that takes this into account somehow would be a boon, I think. All that driving to a huge store many don’t want to be in, when they would rather shop at a smaller place closer to home. Yes, maybe a bit more often, but if it is only a short trip, that’s still not very many one-person-one-car miles.

In other words, are “convenient” large stores centralizing and concentrating traffic into a handful of intolerably frustrating intersections and commercial strips, as opposed to the distributed and localized approach of a larger number of smaller, neighborhood-sized stores? Probably.

Aldi, Trader Joe’s, and Price Rite tap into this—much smaller than the ShopRites, Pathmarks, Wegmans, Walmart Supercenters, etc. Even Lidl is smaller than the behemoths. A Lidl opened near me not far from a forest of garden apartments and I have seen older people walking to the store with their folding carts! And even if they drove, they could do so on back roads over a very short trip.

To go on a little bit of a tangent here, it has occurred to me before that the rise of small-format grocery stores, especially Aldi and Lidl, is in many ways reinventing the once-ubiquitous neighborhood supermarket, a form that had mostly died out in the United States by the 1970s. (However, here’s one, on a street in Lambertville, New Jersey, that improbably remained in business into the late 1990s!)

In a piece I did back in October on the current state of the 500ish Borders bookstore locations vacated in 2011, I found that roughly 20 percent of former Borders locations currently house small-format supermarkets. This is one possible indicator that we’re beginning to move away from a big-box model in the grocery industry. Which could in turn be a little indicator that we’re reconsidering the car-dependent status quo, even if most people wouldn’t think of it in those terms, or even think about it at all.

So here’s a question that’s broadly related to both the traffic congestion angle and the local supermarket angle. It’s very popular these days to include a supermarket, usually a little bit smaller than a standard big-box model, in the bottom floor of a new apartment complex. It allows the project to market itself as mixed-use, and it also obviously provides a convenience for residents. It has the potential to reduce driving considerably, especially important when such complexes are located along already traffic-heavy commercial thoroughfares.

But will the average person do the majority of their shopping at whatever supermarket chain happens to be located below their apartment? Or are we just too used to variety? To searching for the best deal on a given item? To hopping into a two-ton car for 32 ounces of milk and mentally rounding a 20-minute trip down to zero?

I’m not being derogatory here. I’m describing my own behavior too. My wife and I live within easy walking distance to a Safeway. Giant is about a five-minute drive; Whole Foods, Harris Teeter, and Trader Joe’s are 8-10; Wegmans is 15-20.

I don’t like to get anything at Safeway if I can help it; it’s overpriced and reminds me of the aging 1970s-era supermarkets I can just remember growing up in central Jersey, almost all of which have been totally remodeled or demolished.

So I drive to all of the others. Wegmans is for salad, deli meats, steak, and chicken breasts; Whole Foods is for fish; Trader Joe’s is for frozen lunches, hearts of palm, and olive oil; Harris Teeter is for spaghetti and artichoke bottoms. I could go on. (I do, in fact, have a ranking of the spring mix from every major supermarket chain.) If any one of these superior supermarkets were within walking distance, I doubt I would do most of my shopping there, though I might do a little more of it than I do now.

So if having a really great supermarket within walking distance won’t even convince an urbanist like me to give up drives to the supermarket, what will convince the average person to do so? Anything? One can certainly imagine sticks: taxes, etc. But what would actually make you want to drive less? What would make you excited to leave the car in the garage…or sell it? Leave a comment, send an email!

Related Reading:

Thoughts on Restaurants and “Service”

Unnerved in the City

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