Given tourism rates and where those tourists are from, I think it's super-common to like visiting pedestrian-friendly, compact old cities but prefer to live in modern car-friendly ones. I'm such a person myself: visiting those places is fun, sort of like visiting a Humanity & Crowds theme park, but where I live I want to relax and have some separation.

That's not as incompatible as it may seem: only a fraction of area of those cities are ultra-compact medieval mazes (and you can usually recognize it because it's named "The Old {Town/District/Port/Giraffe/Whatever}"); for living and relaxing, most of the population doesn't live in the ancient part of a city. For example, this is one of the non-touristy neighborhoods: spacious yet walkable (plus public transport if you're not feeling walky), a few minutes from the Old Town. Finding a parking spot could be tricky, though. https://www.google.cz/maps/@50.0753781,14.450439,3a,75y,53.5... Note that this neighborhood is also an "old city" by most definitions (founded in the 1890s).

Me too. When I moved from San Francisco to Atlanta I traded a public transit commute for a car commute. I still spend the same amount of time getting to and from work but I don't have to spend it physically crammed in with other human beings.

To me that reads as "I no longer can use that time to read or do something productive". Each to their own, though. Though it depends on the conditions of the public transportation - being crammed in a bus is very different from having a seat on a train or ferry, as I usually do.

When I had a public transit commute, I rarely read, even though I read a lot in general. Even if I had a seat concentrating on anything was too difficult. I listened to a lot of podcasts, which I still do in my driving commute, and those had the side benefit of drowning out the noise of humanity.

My favorite commutes have been walking commutes, but I haven't had a job where I could do that in years, and I bought a house which isn't within walking distance of any jobs I'd want so that won't happen for the foreseeable future. Unless the walk from my bedroom to my home office counts as a "commute".

For me, crammed into a bus/train isn't that bad, provided that A/C is run at full blast and the direction of airflow is top->down. This means that winter commutes by public transit in the northeast is absolutely miserable, since they never ever turn on the A/C to dehumidify the space, even if humidity is close to 100%.

You seem to imply that a city can be either pedestrian-friendly or car-dependent, but there is an intermediate state: pedestrian-and-car-friendly.

Furthermore, pedestrian-friendly is nice if you manage to sleep in a nice accommodation at a walkable distance from your centers of interest: this is usually the case when you visit a town as a tourist, but not so easy when you leave there.

On the walkability and livability of Prague: having lived there for a few decades, I claim that you can't have both: mostly, you'll get a lot of talk for walkability, and a lot of construction for drivability (which has, so far, only brought more traffic into the city). Worst case, you'll get an intermediate state that's pedestrian-and-car-hostile (there are such places right in the city center, where a north-south freeway had been rammed through).

However, for all the roadbuilding of the past 30+ years, the city remains well walkable, in a loose sense: the dense public transit network (a dirt-cheap yearly pass, trains running separate from all other traffic, semi-separated light rail, and an auxillary bus network) allows me to move about easily: walk a bit, hop on, ride a few stops, walk a bit again. This way, anything is within my "walking" distance. So, even though I'm not living in the city center, I can get there within half an hour (or in half an hour by car, hunting for parking spots included).

This, I believe, is the crucial part: walking by itself is okay for short distances, but needs efficient public transport on longer trips: "we'll just buy a bus or two" doesn't cut it.

(So, yes, it's easy even when living here: walking is not a tourist attraction, it's a mode of transport; and I even see a lot of tourists on the metro, "doing as the Romans do": using public transport as an extension of their legs.)

Pedestrian-friendly cities have good public transport systems.

For example, in London only half of families have a car, and very few have two: http://content.tfl.gov.uk/technical-note-12-how-many-cars-ar...

When I lived in London, and later Stockholm and Malmö, I didn't have nor need a car. Sweden was particularly pedestrian-friendly.