Indeed, it's not so much that americans are too lazy to walk, but they've been conditioned to not walk.

When I was a child, I road a big yellow school bus to my elementary school, at the time it seemed very far away, when my parents had to go to the school for any reason, they drove their car.

But now, looking at a map, I see that it was literally only a half mile from my house, but I never walked because it meant walking along some streets with heavy car traffic and no sidewalks, just an ungraded shoulder with no curb or other separation from the roadway.

It wasn't until I moved to San Francisco that I realized that walking (or biking) is a far nicer way to get around.

A couple of weeks ago we returned a rental car to San Diego, after a one way trip. We checked into the hotel, then were going to go to the airport for the return. We asked the clerk how to get back from the rental car return. "Taxi or Uber is your best bet, though I think there's a bus."

We looked on the map. The rental return was a mile away from the hotel, with sidewalks the whole way. We walked.

Pretty bad clerk you had there, I can't believe the suggestion to take taxi from a rental car return to a terminal. But the comparison that the average traveler is ready to walk a mile from their parking spot to the terminal with all their luggage is a bit far-out.

Sorry, I didn't explain that right. We drove from San Francisco to San Diego, with several stops on the way. We were tourists in San Diego for a couple of days. Our hotel was walking distance from nearly everywhere we wanted go, so we figured to not pay for a car for those extra couple of days. We checked into the hotel, moved our bags into the room, dropped off the car at the San Diego airport, the returned to the hotel for the rest of our visit.

So the walk was from the rental car return to the hotel, not the rental car return to the terminal.

> most Americans wouldn't walk anyway

I'm hostile because the whole "look how shitty america is" narrative gets old after a while.

The USA has enough land to (still) let the car be king, even in many cities, and has enough wealth to let even the "poor" to own a car, and you think that's a case of "look how shitty america is"?

There are many people in the world who would literally kill for such a lifestyle, and you think it's a symbol of how "shitty" America is?

Why do you think that America's car culture could be perceived as a bad thing? And if you can understand why others think it's bad, why do you take such offense when they point it out?