alt Hacker News> Traffic?
The premise of these places is that it's on your way. That's not any more traffic, it's just the people already passing by stopping there momentarily.
> Parking?
That's this:
> I suppose that wouldn't be so much of an issue if there was a lot more of these shops, but then they might not be economically viable.
This is "nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded". You would get as many of them as were viable, which would be enough that none of them were inundated.
You would also get things like part-time shops. You have someone with a work-from-home job and they put out a sign in front of their house saying you can get coffee and food there. They mainly get a few customers during the morning rush and a few more at lunchtime and do the work-from-home job the rest of the day.
Those would be everywhere if it was allowed, and they wouldn't even need parking lots because they wouldn't have enough simultaneous customers to fill one and there would generally be one within walking distance of any given place anyway.
> There's a lot of space between "walkable" and "30-45m drive away."
Except that if you concentrate it all into the same place, that's how you get serious traffic congestion, and then going to that place means you get stuck in traffic. Which means there isn't actually that much space between them, because the middle isn't an option. Either you put shops near where people live and it's walkable or you concentrate them downtown and you're stuck in traffic or circling to find parking to get there.
>> I suppose that wouldn't be so much of an issue if there was a lot more of these shops, but then they might not be economically viable.
> This is "nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded". You would get as many of them as were viable, which would be enough that none of them were inundated.
No, I think you're misunderstanding what I'm saying. What I'm saying is a busy coffee shop has negative externalites on its surrounding neighborhood (traffic, people parking in front of your house all the time). That could be mitigated if you had so many coffee shops that none of them were busy enough for those externalites to matter (e.g. at most a handful of cars out front), but a coffee shop that slow may not make enough money to actually survive.
So you may have a natural and legitimate resistance to more, because of the externalites.
>> There's a lot of space between "walkable" and "30-45m drive away."
> Except that if you concentrate it all into the same place, that's how you get serious traffic congestion, and then going to that place means you get stuck in traffic. Which means there isn't actually that much space between them, because the middle isn't an option. Either you put shops near where people live and it's walkable or you concentrate them downtown and you're stuck in traffic or circling to find parking to get there.
Like have you lived in a suburb? Shops aren't usually walkable, but they're not "concentrated downtown" either. The middle is totally an option, and that's probably the usual situation. I don't know why people are gravitating to this false dichotomy (walkable OR 45min away, NO in-between). Grocery stores and coffee shops are like 10-15 minute drive away from most suburban homes, and there's never a jam.