I don't know about you, but if I've driven an hour to go to a store and can't park my ute directly in front of it, I turn straight around and go home again.

Just to clarify, are you suggesting that people can’t drive 30, 40, 50 kms, park in a building or around the corner and walk an extra few meters?

That was never my topic.

In the next town (30km from here), it was as you described, and everyone was OK with that: Several underground parking garages and a large pedestrian zone in the city center. But this is getting more and more problematic. The new mayor decided to cripple the cities traffic infrastructure to force people into (inadequate) public transport or (imaginary) bikes. So now it is seriously difficult and time-consuming to reach those garages in the first place. Yes, there is park&ride outside of town and one could take a metro from there to near the city center, but the metro is very infrequent (30min interval) and initially took way longer than the trip by car. But instead of improving the metro connection, they crippled down the commute by car so it is now nearly as bad as the metro. And the next public transport stop is quite outside the pedestrian zone, anyway. Guess what, customers are pissed, retailers are pissed. And the bikers did not even get a worthwhile cycling infrastructure out of this.

On top of that (but that is really a personal problem) the metro station at the P&R is so badly built that I have problems getting my wife (who is handicapped) on the train in the first place. So we only use it when we need to go to places that are actually reachable with the tram. For access to the pedestrian zone, we still have to fight our way to the underground car parks in the city center, or go to places outside the crippled city.