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Comment by haroldp | Hacker News Reader

Disagree. If most people lived in dense mixed-use neighborhoods where they could walk from home to 90% of the destinations they needed (work, school, groceries, restaurants, entertainment, dentist, etc) they wouldn't need to own a car, and the nominal difference in price between a small corner grocery and a distant chain mega-chain store wouldn't be enough to compel they to buy, park, fuel and maintain one.

Restrictive single-use zoning makes this type of community effectively illegal, despite it being a big consumer choice winner in places where it is allowed.

Perhaps instead of a coercive fix for a problem caused by a coercive fix, we should strike at the root and allow people to buy what they want in the first place?

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It's exactly how I live in Sweden, even though I'm in a suburb some 15km away from the centre of Stockholm, living in a house by the forest, I still have the option to go into the closest by independent grocer at the metro station or to the bigger grocer some 5-8 min away by bike.

When I need something quickly I just pop by the nearest grocer, they also have a different variety than the larger one further away. If I need to buy some more expensive items then I know it's worth it to bike further away.

It's a good balance, I have options and both grocers seem to be doing fine (the independent one is even expanding, new freezers/fridges, opened a whole new section for cheese, etc.).

Even though it's a suburb it's quite compact, and well planned. There are some 3000 apartments around the station (walking distance no longer than 10 min), while I live further out closer to the forest and lake (about 20 min walking) in a town house, there are many other town houses and some 5-10 min away from me there are some villas. Population of this suburb is around 13-14k people.

I live similarly (in the Stockholm suburbs), but I live near a metro station, and there is a reasonably good, not too expensive chain grocery next to the metro station. I get lots of things there, but there are a few things I need that they don't have, and for those things, I travel (by public transportation) to larger stores farther away.

On the one hand, haroldp is correct in that the automobile-centered infrastructure enables the coercion of people to travel farther to shop for groceries. But that point doesn't really contradict the article; this coercion is also enabled by the failure to enforce laws that are on the books. I'd argue that there are far, far too few independent groceries in Stockholm, for example, for reasons that have nothing to do with the transportation infrastructure and everything to do with the lack of effective antitrust legislation, or lack of enforcement (I actually don't know which it is).

> I'd argue that there are far, far too few independent groceries in Stockholm, for example, for reasons that have nothing to do with the transportation infrastructure and everything to do with the lack of effective antitrust legislation, or lack of enforcement (I actually don't know which it is).

Completely agree with you, there are far too few independent grocers and I make a point to shop at them to avoid only ending up at Coop/ICA/Hemköp/Willys. Also because my local independent grocer stocks very different products than the big chains, there's a lot of ethnic ingredients (Arabic, Ethiopian [including fresh injera], Korean, South American, and so on) that are entirely missing from the ICA Maxi close by. At least the one around me has found a good niche to compete.

When I moved to Sweden 10+ years ago a friend of mine told me his retirement plan was to save enough money to open a grocery store, I thought he was joking but he did that 2 years ago and it is actually quite profitable to be a Hemköp franchisee...

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