Do cars steal your time?

As I have been trying to drive less, I feel undefined restlessness on weekends, like I should be going somewhere. I think that cars can steal time from us in a subtle way.

It has to do with what we do because we can. We have a grocery store a mile away, and once last summer I needed some little thing, so I rode my bike there to get it. I could have driven, and it would have been faster, but not terribly. I timed the bike trip, and it took something like ten minutes or less to get there, then the same amount of time back, with the time on site being the same regardless of the means of transport. So the extra time to go by bike is not the total time to go by bike, but the time to go by bike minus the time to go by car.

But, going by bike felt like a bit more effort, and going by car would have felt much easier. Because going by car feels faster and easier, we know that we always have that capability to run to the store for something or other, and I think that the knowledge in the backs of our minds that we can just pop over to the store for something or other makes us tolerant of it, more willing to do it, and after some years of that we start to feel funny if we aren't doing it.

I wonder if a bit more difficulty in getting things on short notice would gradually make us plan better so we would not run out of critical things at critical times (the bottle of aspirin, the bag of chocolate chips). If we planned better in supplying our various needs, maybe we wouldn't have to run to the store AT ALL. A "quick" trip still takes time. If we didn't have to make the trip at all, however quick, we would save the time. Cars allow us to spend those little bits of time in a way that seems painless, but it still is time spent.