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I recently found an interesting post about the driving/transit+walking divide that I'd like to discuss some here: If We Want a Shift to Walking, We Need to Prioritize Dignity.
The basic point that this article makes is that a good and necessary measure as to whether people would actually want to walk somewhere looks like so:
I would like to use this to assert that: For 99% of modern-day American cities that are not currently pedestrian-friendly, there is no reasonable change that will ever make them so.
The problem is that, once you build a city to be car-friendly in the modern American style, with 3-4+ lane arterial surface roads and expressways everywhere and all businesses having massive parking lots that are virtually never full, the structure of your city is fundamentally unwalkable. You can toss in some sidewalks and buses, but you'll never create a landscape where people actually want to walk places. Not that literally nobody will ever walk anywhere, but where people who have money and status and can afford to keep cars will actively choose to walk and take busses to places instead of driving.
Here's a link to a Google Street View of a random road in a random medium-small city in America. It's actually fairly urban compared to the surrounding region, but I'm pretty sure nobody who has any alternatives chooses to walk there. And in fact, there aren't any pedestrians visible on that road in Street View. You can create some paths to walk on, but you can't duct-tape making walking dignified and respectable onto a region where it isn't already.
IMO, the majority of attempts to make walkable neighborhoods in non-walkable regions are not particularly useful. Usually, they're in residential areas, and you can maybe make that one neighborhood walkable, and create one little walkable urban square with some restaurants, coffee shops, light retail, a bar or two, etc. But you're not going to be able to create an area where a successful person can access everything they want to be able to do regularly with walking and transit, because they can't get anywhere but that one little urban square easily. Not saying that they aren't pleasant or that people living there don't like them, but they're never going to lead to a region or society where people choose not to have cars.
Walkability and car culture are topics that come up pretty often here, so I figure I'll chip in my two cents: I spent last year living without a car or bike in what is, so near as I can tell, a "walkable city" here in the US. I had two grocery stores within a 10 minute walk; medical clinics, banks, and restaraunts within a 20 minute walk; and a robust public transit system for anything further away. Basically, any part of the city was accessible within a ~30 minute trip. I did have to wait at crosswalks for some destinations, but most of these spots could be easily reached without having to deal with a single car.
Despite this, I severely disliked it. The summers were brutally hot, the winters were brutally cold and snowy, and as a result any excursion outside was uncomfortable. Carrying groceries was a chore, and carrying more than a few days' of groceries was more or less out of the question entirely, which in turn necessitated extra trips to the grocery store. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of trips I took to banks, clinics, or other essential services, and the slew of restaraunts and nightlife available were simply not worth the trip. None of it was unbearable and I was able to make it all work well enough; that said, it made every task beyond the comforts of my home that much more unpleasant and undesirable.
Part of this is due to the fact that I'm a natural hermit, and my idea of a nice night involves staying home with a good book or an entertaining movie; part of it is due to the fact that I'm a country mouse by birth, and I vastly prefer solitude and open spaces to cramped urban offerings. But the fact remains: 99 times out of 100, I would prefer to travel by car to do my work, play, and chores, and this preference would remain regardless of how many amenities are on tap, how much "dignity" is afforded me, or how great the distances involved are (with exception, of course: if the grocery store were next door, then it would be stupid to take a car, but any city block so dense as to have everything I might need would also be so dense that I would despise living there).
As it stands, the car-centric system we have does an adequate job of meeting my preferences (and, I think, the preferences of a sizable portion of the population). I can enjoy both the peace of rural living and the amenities and services of a large city. Any extra expense that I might cost society by living where I do is amply met by the increased gas taxes and costs I pay, and that's a trade I'm happy to make. There seems to be very little acknowledgement of this point of view, so I'd like to make it clear that there are, in fact, people for whom daily walking is less preferable than daily driving.
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