You’re confusing yourself with suburbs. Most American cities are highly walkable. Safety is the limiting factor.

Having cities arranged on grids with huge wide roads is generally a recipe for non-walkable environments. If you are having to wait ages for a light to change every time you go from one block to the next, you lose much of the efficiency of walking.

> Having cities arranged on grids with huge wide roads is generally a recipe for non-walkable environments.

There's no problem with grids or wide roads as long as there is infrastructure in place for pedestrians. Bridges can allow people to cross over wide streets/traffic without having to wait for a light for example. Tunnels can be an option as well. Grids can really help a city be more walkable since it becomes dead simple to navigate and you aren't wasting time on long winding roads or labyrinthine paths which increase the distance between two points and make it easier to get lost.

> There's no problem with grids or wide roads as long as there is infrastructure in place for pedestrians. Bridges can allow people to cross over wide streets/traffic without having to wait for a light for example.

Infrastructure for pedestrians would be you cross as soon as you get there, cars wait. Bridges are not pedestrian infrastructure they’re “cars are the priority” infrastructure, “cars mustn’t be delayed or inconvenienced, pedestrians can be” infrastructure.

I don't see a problem with bridges that allow people to access without slowing anyone down. something like https://i.redd.it/m62z7ovxkpg81.jpg or https://media.gettyimages.com/id/1230021650/photo/women-wear... works very well without inconveniencing pedestrians who often appreciate the view

Those add substantial crossing time and are quite costly.

None of the world's great walking cities heavily uses bridge crossings like that.

If you are in hurry, you will avoid those. They add more time to your trip then one would guess intuitively.

What do work for pedestrians is a network of smaller roads that you can "just" cross safely without waiting or taking detours. Basically, a few big roads you cross once in a while and the rest being smaller roads where cars are forced to go slowly.

" without slowing anyone down. " - but the very first image you provided will slow down pedestrians, it's harder to cross compared to a simple direct crosswalk and it's less friendly to ppl with mobility problems. Such bridges are relatively ok to implement outside cities where you have highways/roads with cars driving high speeds but these are bad solutions inside cities where the priority belongs to pedestrians and cars must drive slower

It's inconvenient to climb a set of stairs every time cross a road. What about pushchairs, wheelchairs, the elderly, people with walking sticks, shopping trolleys, arthritis, gammy knees, people carrying heavy shopping or wheeled luggage? In general if you're going to slow down anyone then slow down drivers who have engines to accelerate them back up to speed with no effort. Making people climb stairs so drivers don't have to wait is not good pedestrian infrastructure, the view (of a road full of cars who have priority over you) is hardly a great trade off. Nor is paying the extra taxes for bridge maintenance so that car drivers can have a better life at your expense.

When you consider that drivers are generally wealthier (because they own cars) and the pedestrians are breathing car exhaust and tyre dust while working their lungs harder climbing to give cars the priority, listening to car noise while drivers pass in low effort comfort, the mild unfairness of it is more starkly contrasted.

Ideally good pedestrian design would tempt people out of their cars because walking is so quick, convenient, cheap, pleasant, interesting - with shade and shops and short distances and quiet clean surroundings. Big steel bridges don't contribute to that very much. [Have you seen how often Americans comment on the price of gas? Yet what people campaign for is the government to lower the price of gas, not for the government to make life without cars so pleasant that cars are not a necessity. What sense does that make? Most living Americans have never lived in a walkable place, and have no film, tv, or cultural reference for one to use for a basis for such a campaigh - maybe Disneyland (which visitors tend to love)? 120 years ago everywhere was walkable because there wasn't much other than walking. 70 years ago places were bulldozed for cars. Now multiple generations have grown up and lived their adult lives with car dependent urban design].

Grids are better than culdesac but worse than randomness for a human brain so that it would be interesting to walk there. Wide roads aren't good for walkability in any sense: even if we ignore huge noise and pollution created by lots of cars, wide roads are more dangerous to cross and since it's wide you as a pedestrian need to walk more on non pedestrian infra to get to points of interest. Walkability isn't just about being able to walk

Outside my university there was a fairly fast "A" road (two lanes, high speed limit, actually much narrower than a typical American street). Rather than stop traffic, there was a bridge that crossed the road. To use the bridge you needed to climb a set of stairs. Of course, people didn't use the bridge because it was inconvenient and tiring to have to take a longer route (including stairs) rather than just walk 8-10 meters across the road.

There were severe injuries or deaths every single year when students would cross the road late at night and a car would be speeding at 60+ mph. They eventually installed a puffin-style crossing, which was much better.

The solution, especially in built up areas, is to keep cars from causing problems for pedestrians rather than trying to stop pedestrians from causing problems for cars. Perhaps the cars should be relegated to a tunnel so people don't have to be near them instead.

The fact safety is a limiting factor means those places don't have social control, meaning these are not places ppl tend to hang out in so probably not that walkable. P.s. walkable in this context doesn't mean it's just possible to walk, it means it's a nice experience to walk with nice environment/shops/othwr points of interest

"Highly walkable" means many people would choose to walk even if able to take a car.

To be walkable a city needs to be quick to walk between destinations and pleasant to do so.

Most US cities are too spaced out, require waiting at each block, or are not all that pleasant for walking.

I own the domain AmericanUrbanism[.]org - I've been thinking of setting up some kind of advocacy group (501c4) or even political party there focused on changing this reality.

Cars made more sense in the industrial age, when people needed to commute to a factory for work. But, in the age of knowledge work and especially remote work, we aren't commuting as much. So, walkable neighborhoods become far more important and impactful.

I think there should be just many types of neighborhoods. Those who need a car for longer distance travel should accept living further away from city center, where there's enough space for parking slots, while the rest can enjoy pedestrian-first neighbourhoods closer to services. Public transport should of course reach all areas, so that the car owners have no real need to use their car much to reach the denser areas.

>Those who need a car for longer distance travel should accept living further away from city center

Strongly feel this acceptance will be difficult to actualize sans coercion.

How so? We've built huge amounts of infrastructure (parking being the obvious one) to explicitly enable people to have cars in city centers- stop doing that and my gut (scientific, I know!) says that'll get you most of the way there.

The least coercive way to do it is probably by making areas closer to the city center worse for driving — narrow roads, no parking, etc — and better for walking and biking. Then people will naturally sort themselves based on their preferences. The problem being that establishing the needed urban environment is itself a political struggle.

IMO the key is better public transport.

I never drive to London because a train will get me there faster, and I can rely public transport to get me to almost anywhere I want to get to. It can definitely be useful to have a car in the suburbs but not enough to be worth the trouble of driving one there.

The difficulty of parking and driving around the city centre is a deterrent, but to me it is secondary to the positive factors.

I do like pedestrianised areas, because they feel safe and clean. The main danger remaining is the cyclists of the "get out of my say" type, especially couriers and the like.