I find it's mostly a suburban and rural thing. Though, even large US cities can be quite suburban in their makeup. I found Phoenix to be surprisingly difficult to navigate on foot, for example.

There is recreational walking, but it can be odd. I have family members who live in areas without sidewalks, and they do regularly go for pleasure walks, but such outings tend to start with a car ride. Because the nearest place where space has been made for walking is several miles away.

Walking on country roads generally isn't pleasant. The roads are narrow, the traffic is fast, the drivers are discourteous and/or texting while driving, and the only place to put your feet where you're not in danger of being hit by a car is often a drainage ditch.

Cities out West in the States tend to be less dense because they were founded by people who generally had horses/wagons already to get there and because they were founded closer in time to the invention of the automobile, so their infrastructure was less solidified by the time it was introduced and thus they've adapted more to cars with a broader sprawl and less vertical buildup. Of course this isn't true of all cities in the Western US, but as a general trend it holds up.

It's definitely not true of larger cities. Here in Manhattan more than 3/4ths of households don't even own cars, so yeah, there's lots of walking.

It's a post ww2 suburban thing.

In the suburbs I grew up in, walking, especially to accomplish practical tasks like grocery shopping, was seen a signal that you were "on welfare" - which was code for poverty.

Meanwhile, people drove to fitness clubs to walking miles on treadmills while slurping energy drinks.

>I have seen plenty of footage of people walking around large US cities.

Where, in the movies?

If you're talking about Manhattan, NYC, that place is absolutely nothing like the rest of America, except maybe for a few other large cities' downtown areas (DC, Boston, Portland, etc). These few places have entirely different lifestyles from the rest of rural and suburban America, where cars reign supreme.

You can walk in the countryside all you want, but you'll be walking on the asphalt roadway with vehicles zooming along at 70mph and limited sightlines, so you'll probably end up dead in a ditch by the side of the road if you make that a lifelong habit. The driver who killed you probably won't stop, and would not be punished by the legal system even if they did.

For example: https://13wham.com/news/local/pedestrian-hit-by-car-then-tic...

Hit by a car at 3pm, i.e. broad daylight. "Deputies ticketed Weaver for not being as far off the road as possible. The driver who hit him was not charged."