What ends up happening is, people in cars just avoid the city centre (who are usually doing several other measures to repel cars), and end up going to the out-of-town places instead. This fuels a proliferation of sprawl, of course.
We welcome many foreign visitors (mostly German) every weekend and they seem to have no problems with it.
An interesting experiment would be that if you pay for parking at the city edge, your parking stub can act as a (family pass?) transit ticket.
Though I think the parking is usually free, in contrast with parking in the city centre.
The parking is free and the bus fee is € 6 for two-way to the center, and addtionally for all lines in the city within an hour of parking or leaving.
Here we take public transport, and in the case of London, there’s a green belt that prevents any further sprawl.
Another point worth mentioning, the EU is significantly denser and more built up than the US. We don’t have huge tracts of empty land around our cities, for the most part, it’s simply not possible to create a new suburb in many parts of Europe due to the lack of empty space.
Public transit is serviceable if you need to get to Paris and live in an area served by the suburban trains (or else you need to take a bus or two to reach the station).
But for your day-to-day needs, shopping malls are mostly outside the towns, and they're usually a hassle to reach without a car. There will usually be a bus service, but again, it will probably not be close to where you live, and going grocery shopping for a whole family by bus can't be particularly enjoyable.
Shopping malls exist, but it seems the majority of the towns the make up the Greater London area have managed to preserve big chunks of their town centres, and recently it feels like there’s been an effort to build out those town centres. The town centres usually have every you need from big to small shops, and open late (the U.K. is a little unusual for Europe in that most of our store, regardless of size, are open late, with a substantial number being 24/7).
Driving into and out of these town centres is painful. Taking the bus and walking is much easier. And because shops are open late, doing small shops after work is very easy and extremely common.
Equally driving “out of town” is incredibly painful. For me, reaching the edge of London is a one hour drive in mostly stationary traffic. Far easier to walk or bike to our nearest town centre, assuming the nearest corner shop doesn’t have what we need.
I think this is a very important point.
In Paris proper, only stores in "tourist areas" (as defined by the local authority — that's basically in the heart of Paris, and around the Eiffel Tower) may stay open late. It's fairly easy to find supermarkets open until 10 PM. After that, not so much. But "regular stores" (say clothing) usually close at 7-8 PM.
Outside Paris proper, the situation isn't as good. Stores usually close around 7 PM and even supermarkets rarely close after 8 PM.
I think the issue is mostly political, there have been attempts to keep stores open later as well as on Sundays, but they have been shot down by local unions.
I do all my daily shopping in local shops, I have 5 or 6 in walking distance, 20+ in bicycle distance. The last time I went to a mall was for a specific offer in a specific specialty store, which is certainly not a daily activity.
It's a matter of will and not killing off in-town shopping.
I agree that shopping malls have killed in-town shopping. But maybe there's a reason for that? In-town shops usually don't stay open late enough for people who depend on public transit for longer commutes, which is the case for many people living in the suburbs. Those people don't usually live there by choice, it's usually because they couldn't afford to live in the city center. That's the case for my parents, for example.
I don't doubt that there must also have been a comfort angle to that, it's easier to just drive to a big store, get everything you need in one place, and drive back. Also, malls are usually much cheaper that in-town stores. Which, again, is important for people who have to live in the suburbs because of limited means.
I'm in the same situation as you, probably even better. I have multiple shops open until 10 PM less than a 10-minute walk away. But I realize that not everyone can afford to live in the city center, so it's not just a matter of will.
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My parents live in a 20000 people town, so it's not the boonies. The closest non-bakery shop is 20 minutes away on foot. It's open from 9 AM to 8 PM, and it only has your basics. Want anything other than packaged sausage and cheese? Tough. The butcher and cheese vendor close at 7 PM.
By public transit, it's impossible for them to be home before 7:30 PM for my mom and 8:30 for my dad. They can basically only shop on weekends, so they'd have to haul provisions for the whole week. They cannot do "daily shopping".
Of course, my dad's commute is 1:30 each way by transit if there are no issues, or 30 minutes by car, which is what he ends up using.
I don't live in the city center, it's a 25 minute bus ride there if there's no traffic, but even here I have local shops everywhere, since we don't have zoning laws that restrict shops in residential areas. Shops are generally open until 21 or 22, some until midnight.
My point is that the dependency on malls is not inevitable, it can be prevented and/or remedied, and changing zoning laws is one of the ways to do it.
My girlfriend lives in a town of 1500 people, and there are 3 grocery stores, several pizzarias and bakeries, as well as other local amenities. Everything is walkable and they have both train and bus connections to the nearest cities. That's how to do it, not the like similarly sized village in Germany she came from, where there are literally no stores, no restaurants, no nothing, and the only transit they have is a bus that runs every hour between 8 and 17 on weekdays. No wonder that town is dead.
A quick glance at Wikipedia tells me that the "urban" area of Copenhagen is ten times smaller than that of Paris (292.5 km2 vs 2,853.5 km2). Not sure how comparable those are in practice. But a 25-minute bus ride with no traffic, in Paris, would put you inside Paris proper, not in the suburbs. Public transport is fairly good there.
The issue is many people live and work outside of Paris proper, and transit from suburb to suburb is poor. Most suburban trains go to Paris and bus routes are relatively short. They're working on improving things, but there's still much to do. So the issue is more one of time, rather than zoning per se. People don't have the time to go to the local shops were they live, so towns don't thrive.
Maybe if there was less concentration, so if instead of having one big city in the middle of an enormous suburb, there were multiple smaller cities, the situations would resemble that of Copenhagen. But for some reason, people insist on running all their businesses in the same few spots and bring people in from long distances (relatively speaking).