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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.
I live in a country where every city is as walkable as it gets, if only because the vast majority of their denizens don't own or are unable to afford a car.
I still dislike walking and value the inherent freedom provided by a personal vehicle. You try riding a bus or a train when it's fucking hot, especially when they're not air-conditioned by default. Or during rush hour when the only reason I'm not sniffing smelly armpits is because I'm so tall that they have to be subject to mine instead.
I spent a decent chunk of time in London, which is certainly one of the cities lauded for the quality of its public transport. Even then, as a poor bastard who had to catch the bus or board the metro to get most places, I didn't enjoy the amount of walking it took to get from pickup and drop-off points to where I actually wanted to go. That's leaving aside things like transporting a week's worth of groceries.
I am cognizant of the inherent tradeoffs that come with building car-friendly cities and I still prefer that over shank's pony, which is as obsolete as any other horse.
Hmm, I should really get around to getting my driver's license, I let my learner's lapse at least 2 times because I was too lazy to finish the course.
This is not a substantitve response, but it has been decades since I've heard that phrase. You brought a smile to my day, sir.
Given that I've been on the phone with a depressed best friend and a depressed girlfriend, I'm glad I made someone smile haha.
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