IMO modifying life style for chronic car owners is nonstarter. Simple / fair incentivize is to make it justifiably expensive. Reduce street parking / op lots. If stores want car customers, they need to build parking infra onsite, either above or below grade. Expensive car elevators if they have to. Charge premium for parking costs. If they try to pass on cost to all customers instead of just drivers, then their prices will be less competitive with stores without onsite parking. Car owners have right to car, but they should pay for all of externalities, and if that works out to be expensive parking bill everytime they bulk shop then so be it.
There is no 'street parking' next to shopping centers/malls, it's all organized parking lots (usually underground, below the shopping center). What kind of a shopping center requires you to park on the street?
I live in a relatively small city with a pedestrian zone "historic center", and all of the larger...ish shopping centers are outside the city center, and larger stores are on the 'edge' of the city. Both the stores and restaurants in the city center are tourist-based and so are many residential properties that are now just airbnbs causing the housing crisis to be even worse. On a rainy january afternoon (so, last week for us), the city center is dead. No toursts, noone goes there to shop, since you can go futher out with a car, noone goes there to walk around, since it's raining, so it's just a few people that work there during the day and not even them in the afternoon. I mean.. why would you go to shop there, if you can drive to the edge of the city, where you can park without issues, buy stuff and drive it home?
Why would I want to drive somewhere just to shop? I don't care about rain. If it is absolutely pouring I don't need to to out. I don't feel the need to live entirely disconnected from nature.
