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As I've gotten older and my joints more rickety, I can tell you that the prospect of multiple trips down to the shop (even the one not too far away) and carrying bags of groceries back is much less appealing than when I was in my 20s and 30s. "Twenty to thirty minute walk home carrying heavy bag of goods in my left hand" was okay when I was 35, now it's "Urgh, lemme see if I can shop online and have that delivered".
'No car' is great when you want to live in a city, when everything is on your doorstep so to speak, and you're doing nothing more strenuous than carrying a day's groceries like bread and milk home, there's a range of choices if you want to go out to eat instead of cooking at home, and if you need something big delivered (imagine you bought a new wardrobe) the shop will drop that off for you. (That still leaves the problem of 'no cars but we do need delivery lorries and trucks', and seeing large trucks trying to park on the streets in order to drop off goods at the stores is something regular in my town).
If you don't have a range of everything on the doorstep (and even the city nearest to me was unusual, decades back, because there were no grocery shops easily accessible in the city centre, something I never understood when I was in town and wanted to buy a few groceries rather than go out to the shopping centre on the outskirts) or if you need to carry a heavier load or bring a lot of purchases back with you, a car where you can load up or fit everything in the boot is much more appealing, even more necessary if you're not living in town or city.
I get sent to cities for a few weeks at a time for my job. I bring a small, soft-frame backpack with me, and for one man by himself it will carry anything as far as I want to carry it.
An older woman, with two grandkids? Not a chance. The problem is once you inconvenience grandma, you end up inconveniencing me, because I want my family to be near grandma, and so we all end up driving.
How do European grandmas pull it off, then?
Pretty much because many Europeans, especially in more dense city centers, and even in the suburbs (which are more dense in many cases than American suburbs) don't go to the supermarket once a week and get an ungodly amount of food. There's a local market, or at least a much closer supermarket they can stop by daily or maybe three times a week, get what they need quickly, and then go home.
I agree, it’s simply such a ridiculous thing to suggest when all across Europe and indeed most of the world the elderly are fine without needing to drive literally everywhere. The American suburb is the abomination, not the dense city, which is the norm for huge numbers of people for thousands of years.
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