> many places don't have those kinds of laws.

Even in places without zoning codes, you’ll find plenty of restrictions that shape what is built and what it looks like from setbacks to parking minimums.

See Houston for example https://kinder.rice.edu/urbanedge/2020/01/09/no-zoning-in-Ho...

Many Houston neighborhoods are quite livable on foot and bike, if you don't mind a little perspiration. There are shops and restaurants scattered all around, sidewalks, even some multiuse trails.

The mainstream culture is still overwhelmingly automobile-centric, though. Travel to your place of work, or to any particular shop/restaurant, will likely require a car.

...Somewhat related: In Houston I lived within walking distance of two grocery stores, Kroger and Fiesta. A lot of customers walked to these stores, and they'd often use the store's shopping carts to transport purchases back home. So naturally the stores were always losing carts.

Kroger solved this problem by installing an electronic geofence and a wheel lock mechanism on each shopping cart, so they couldn't leave the parking lot.

Fiesta hired a man in a pickup truck to cruise the neighborhood and bring the empty carts back. And customers cooperated by leaving the carts near the road. IIRC different Fiesta stores marked their carts with different bright neon colors, so they could be returned to the correct store if they wandered afield.

Anytime I wanted to buy more than I could carry, of course, I'd go to Fiesta. (This was years ago; it's probably all razed for condo development now.)

I'll never get this. Except for really flat surfaces, shopping carts are the most annoyning thing to push around. If not using a bicycle, at least use a (maybe even compactly foldable) shopping trolley/buggy/Hackenporsche?

Many places do. It was very much the norm as cities were expanding rapidly in the 20th century. Something like 75+% of land in major metropolitan areas in North America are zoned for single-family housing only[1]. And of course that's not evenly distributed between cities, and much of the remaining 25% is still zoned as exclusively residential or commercial.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/18/upshot/cities...