Have you ever had a friend return from a vacation and gush about how great it was to walk in the place they’d visited? “You can walk everywhere! To a café, to the store. It was amazing!” Immediately after saying that, your friend hops in their car and drives across the parking lot to the Starbucks to which they could easily have walked.
Why does walking feel so intuitive when we’re in a city built before cars, yet as soon as we return home, walking feels like an unpleasant chore that immediately drives us into a car?
This is a good article. Has a lot of examples showing why streets have a good or bad pedestrian experience.
It’s not as simple as number of lanes or even the quality of the sidewalk. A lot of it really comes down to development patterns. You can really feel the difference when you’re in a place not built for walking. Being on a well constructed sidewalk far away from any buildings because there’s a giant parking lot in between just feels wrong.
There are a few places very close to my house I refuse to walk to because the pedestrian experience is terrible. You feel out of place, unwelcome, and unsafe.