"I've got shopping and kids to carry"

Now the reason that's sometimes true, and I want to give it its due before I take most of it away.

The big shop is a reason. A week's food for a family doesn't go in a bag on foot, and nobody's asking you to try. If the trip is the big shop, take the car, and say so out loud, and that's the rule working as it should. The same goes for the sack of compost, the flat-pack, the child who's four and has just fallen asleep.

But look at the week's list from chapter 1 and count how many of the trips were that. Most of the shop trips are milk, bread, a thing you forgot, a bottle of wine for tonight. Those go in a bag, and a bag on a shoulder is what shopping was carried in for most of history. A backpack takes more than you'd think, and it changes the errand walk from a burden to nothing in particular. Keep one by the door.

Children walk. A four-year-old can walk six hundred yards, and does, at the park, without anyone remarking on it. A ten-year-old can walk a mile. The school run by car is the clearest example of the default there is, because the school is placed to be walkable and the road outside it is a queue of cars that have driven a distance the children could have covered in the time the queue takes. The Department for Transport's figures show that the share of children aged five to ten walking to school in England rose by five percentage points between 2019 and 2024. Some families have found this out.

If the objection is the timetable, that you're going on to work afterwards, then walk them there and back to the car, which is the same six hundred yards and the same ten minutes you'd have spent in the queue. If it's the younger one in the pram, the pram has wheels. If it's the bag, the child carries their bag, which they do at school all day. I'll come back to the school run in chapter 18, because it's teaching the children something either way.

So the honest version of the objection is this. Some trips carry too much to walk, and the rule lets those go by car. The rest were carrying a bag of milk, and the bag was the reason only because the car was there to make it one.