Carrying capacity is a challenge, but I'm still surprised a 5 minute walk always loses to a 40 minute round trip by car. I struggle to get enough exercise as it is.

Because for a lot of people it isn't a 40-minute round trip by car. It is a five minute each way trip by car for multiple grocery stores for me personally.

In my case, reverse those times.

> The fact that I couldn’t really make big bulk purchases didn’t matter because I could just stop in each evening on my way home to get what

Once someone's gone full r/fuckcars it's sort of difficult to talk sense to them, but have you maybe considered that some people don't want to make the tradeoff of free-time-for-transportation-storage-capacity? Like, for another 2 hours time per week, I'd be willing to buy an SUV so large that statistically 3 kindergarteners would die of smog-related early deaths, with a curb weight of 1.9 million pounds.

Supermarkets in dense cities with most people walking tend to be much smaller (no clothes etc) so it's easy to go round in a few minutes — less if you know exactly what you want.

There is a fixed time in every supermarket trip no matter how big or small it is. Multiple trips accrue these costs. For example, I live next to a supermarket, a big one. It's a 3 minute walk door to door, 6 min round trip. Inside it takes about 5 min to find what I am looking for and another 2-10 minutes to checkout depending on the size of the line. So, at the very best I am spending 13 minutes per trip. If I shopped for groceries there every day I would be spending at least 1.5 hours per week shopping. Instead, I drive my car to Costco every two weeks and spend less than 1.5 hours on that (20 min drive x2, 30 min picking groceries and checking out, 5 min parking, 5 min loading and unloading), saving more than 1.5 hours of my life every other week.

I also use Costco for bulk purchases too, but buying in advance requires careful planning. Unless you have a repetitive diet, supplement with a quick grocery run mid-week, only purchase frozen/shelf stable food, or throw out a bunch of expired food each week it's hard to predict what you need two weeks in advance.

I usually eat out so my diet is quite varied, which is another problem for walking advocates because they are limited only to the restaurants in their walking distance, or cold soggy deliveries, or, ultimately, have to spend a lot of time cooking themselves (or making large batches and eating the same leftovers for days in a row). This is besides the point, which was the time spent with daily shopping by foot. It's incredible waste of time and I know that because I used to do just that.

> so it's easy to go round in a few minutes

x7 days a week. But it's not just the time in the store, it's also whatever detour there is to get to it. At walking speed. Whatever the wait time is at checkout.

> less if you know exactly what you want.

So now, I also increase my mental load because I need to know what I'm cooking tonight an hour or even two hours before I do so? I have to have my meal planned out hours in advance.

And if there is another pandemic like event, I'm also constrained to the one day's supply of food that I have in my house at any given moment (maybe less than that, realistically). And it's still a fucking pain if I'm anything other than single. There was a point in my life not so many years ago, when we were going through about 4 gallons of milk per week. Hell, some of the things that we like to eat, that we should be eating for health reasons... you can't even buy those in single meal sizes. We'll probably have 3 (plastic) bags of vegetables home for salad.

> So now, I also increase my mental load because I need to know what I'm cooking tonight an hour or even two hours before I do so? I have to have my meal planned out hours in advance.

Oh, the horror. Usually I would just go in an see what looks good and decide then what I wanted for dinner.

The detour is small. I think it's also more common to go every second or third day, rather than every day.

Search "supermarket" in Copenhagen — not the city centre — and see how many results there are: https://www.google.com/maps/search/supermarket/@55.703748,12... . You may well need to zoom in and refresh the search to see everything.

> I need to know what I'm cooking tonight an hour or even two hours before I do so?

Rather than knowing a week in advance? Come on.

> Pandemic

You can easily build up some reserves.

> Milk

You clearly have a large family, so you might consider that your situation is not universal. I think many Danes with a large family would mix the two options — shopping by car (or online for delivery) every week or two, and supplementing it with additional trips for fresh food.

Two adults is also two people to share the shopping.

> The detour is small.

For you. That one time. Honestly, I always seem to be on the wrong end of the curve when it comes to salaries... betcha I end up in the ghetto apartment in the food desert.

> Rather than knowing a week in advance? Come on.

Nah. You just get the things you usually get, and you make whatever of that you feel like that evening. No need to plan, you figure it out when you open the fridge.

> You clearly have a large family, s

Just the two children. Even with just two children, this quickly becomes absurdly impossible. For any more than that, the walkable city people just sound like stooges. Well, they sound like that long before we start talking about large families.

The map link is intentionally centred on a ghetto -- Denmark has a legal definition of that.

Around 15-30% of urban Copenhagen households own at least one car, depending on the neighborhood.