What I am saying is that you should have connections with the other people in your community at the shop, not the person hired to interact with you. The relationship with the store owner has nothing to do with whether you drive a car or not.
The relationship you have with others, the other folks at the store shopping, etc are much harder in a suburban geography literally because of the lack of interactions. Drivethu's are the extreme of this.
It's my hypothesis that having a relationship with your local butcher or coffee maker has little to nothing to do with your car, but the relationships you have with others merely due to their proximity to you is the beauty of community. Digital or physical.
I don’t think this is an essential element of community at all, but as I said “ a majority of [the other community members I interact with] would be other people who go to the same places I go”
> It's my hypothesis that having a relationship with your local butcher or coffee maker has little to nothing to do with your car
I’d say you’re right. But I’d also say that the comment “cities are made for cars not people” is equally as insightful as the comment “footpaths are made for shoes not people”, “cycle lanes are made for bicycles not people” or “rail lines are made for trains not people”. Because at the end of the day, shoes, bicycles, cars, buses, trains... are all made for people. I would suggest that a persons perception of their local community has much more to do with how they interact with it than it does the form of transport they use. I’m also certain that there would be a large number of people who live in the same community as I do, which I find to be particularly vibrant, who spend their time not socializing with anybody, and then go home at the end of the day to take out their phone and complain about lack of community.
Only one of those literally puts a glass and metal wall between every single person, and I think it's a significant difference in how social you can realistically be, as all time spent traveling is no longer occurring within a social context, but a private one.
There is literally no city in the world where people are interested in the social experience of public transport.
What connections do you find in your grocery store?
But it's just a reply about the car making your interaction with your community almost exclusively commercial. I've met far more friends at the park, usually when I'm walking through with my dog.
That said, most relationships in a community of people are going to be at least somewhat superficial, because nobody can maintain deep personal relationships with hundreds of people.
The idea that the whole thing is just a cynical commercial racket is silly though. Building a real relationship with your community is the whole point of small local business. A lot of those relationships are genuine friendships. The owner of my local coffee shop invites my wife and I over for dinner every so often, and vice versa. I had my local butcher over a couple of weeks ago because he wanted me to teach him how to make beef rendang.
Even if commerce underlies the relationship, it can still be entirely community based.