With the Supreme Court's Euclid decision in 1916, we've had zoning that has only gotten worse and worse since then, so most things built in the years following that have deviated from that sort of walkable, incremental city that we used to have here too.
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2015/1/7/americas-suburb...
Comparing Seattle's transit system to, say, Munich's (where I currently live) is a sick joke. Munich is far more walkable and bikable, too. Of course, a big part of this is that a majority of the land in Seattle is zoned exclusively for, you guessed it, nothing but detached single-family homes.
As an example, I sometimes visit smaller cities (< 50k) here, and even then they still are highly walkable, moderately dense, and they usually have pretty good transit connections to other places.