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I can't speak to your experience, but I think the available evidence says that people are generally more active in walkable places. e.g. https://cs.stanford.edu/people/jure/pubs/activity-inequality-nature17.pdf
See also this video more generally.
Being near other people makes things safer. Think about an empty parking lot compared to a town square full of people. Which is safer? Urban environments only feel unsafe to walk in when everyone except the poor and homeless are in cars.
Again, I can't speak to your experience; perhaps we're using different definitions of "independent." In my experience, there are a lot of these people, who now live in the city as a young adult, but grew up in suburbs.
Being able to walk to school is one of the best things for children's independence and growth; see e.g. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0272494402902434 or https://www.utoronto.ca/news/why-walking-school-better-driving-your-kids. And as one would expect, walking to school is correlated with living near school and low car traffic.
Ok, but what portion of them actually do this? It seems like you're using notions of independence that most people don't actually experience or engage in, regardless of whether they theoretically could or not. I grew up in the suburbs and I doubt anyone in my neighborhood could grow more food than a handful of tomato plants. Not one of them would survive a zombie apocalypse; to the extent they had extra space for storing things, it went to holding the kid's car, or a lawn mower, or useless old crap, not canned food and jugs of water (and I'm not sure anyone other than our family had ever even fired a gun).
The notion of independence I'm thinking of is making people capable of making their own decisions, evaluating and dealing with risks, handling disagreement, controlling their emotions, etc. But mostly in the context of every day life; I think a lack of independence in this sense is largely at the root of recent spikes in childhood depression and anxiety, in anti-free-speech behavior, in refusal to engage with the outgroup, etc. Being driven everywhere until you're 16 and not being allowed out on your own prevent children from developing these skills.
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