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?
I agree that even small streets can be pedestrian hostile. I live off of a road where most homes were originally .5-1 acre lots built in the early 1960s. Few of the original houses remain unchanged. Most have either been subdivided to build infill homes or torn down to build even more homes (think 3 or 4 SFH replacing 1).
The street design remains unchanged. Two lanes with no sidewalks and drainage ditches on either side of the road. The road is signed 25 mph but most drivers go 35-40 since it is straight and unimpeded for almost half a mile. Pedestrians must either walk in the street and hope drivers go around them or cross the road multiple times to find a flat surface not at the bottom of a 3 foot deep ditch. Since the city considers the road to be an important connector, they refuse to install speed bumps or other traffic calming. There has been a plan to build sidewalks for almost 25 years but it keeps getting pushed back since the project will require burying utilities, tons of fill dirt, and a rebuild of a bridge over a small creek.