> You keep acting like people going to the city are hurting it, they are not. They are helping it - cities should do all they can to attract people from all over, not just those inside the city.

Take a look at a typical suburban shopping center. The stores are single-story buildings and yet there's still significantly more acreage devoted to parking than to the store itself. Yes, it's good for the economy of a city when people from outlying areas commute in for work and shopping. But there's a huge opportunity cost when you size all your infrastructure to accommodate a car for every commuter and then render the city so inaccessible to pedestrians that most of the city's residents also need to get cars and the roads and parking lots need to be expanded even more to accommodate that. If those commuters were coming in to the city by public transit or driving their cars to a parking deck and carrying out their business mostly on foot, they'd provide the same economic benefit to the city as a whole without making the urban lifestyle impossible and requiring even the minimum-wage shop employees to own a car.

The commuters aren't the problem. Their cars are.

The stores geared for pedestrians are usually much much smaller, and people buy a lot less at a time and have less selection.

I personally never shop in such stores, I hate them for being overpriced and never having what I want. They have them in my area - a whole street of them, and I could walk to them, but I never do. I prefer to drive to the larger stores that I find FAR more useful. I fill up my car with FAR FAR FAR more groceries than I could possibly carry by any other method, except perhaps taxi.

> But there's a huge opportunity cost

Hardly. The stores are not interchangeable. I find the stores you like to be useless, and I would never live in a place where that's all they had.

> they'd provide the same economic benefit to the city as a whole

They would not. Typical purchase amounts are not even close. And you would need a lot more stores to cover the same amount of merchandise as those large stores, but of course a lot of small stores is far less efficient than a few larger ones.

I would have to shop every day in your world (no thank you), and I would spend more since I could not buy in bulk. I would probably have a smaller house, so I could not store in bulk either.

> Their cars are.

So your plan is for people to take public transit for 2 hours, every day, to buy small amounts of groceries, only what they could carry home on public transit?

And what kind of public transit could serve rural areas anyway?

I hear you. I think places like Phoenix, Dallas/Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio.. Well, just about most of the US would absolutely blow the minds of a lot of the commenters here. The way a lot are talking is like they have no concept of the massive suburban sprawl of the DFW metroplex with very few "downtown" areas to speak of.