I really think there's something to this. I've been living in a dense urban area that does a poor job of traffic control (San Francisco), and of all the "city p

I really think there's something to this. I've been living in a dense urban area that does a poor job of traffic control (San Francisco), and of all the "city problems" that I find tearing most at my mental well-being is the poor urban design. After a while you realize that there's no such thing as a stress-free, liberating walk. Traffic is so all-pervasive that everywhere you go, you're constantly negotiating your way around vehicular traffic, most of which believes that yielding to pedestrians is a distant second concern to getting around as quickly as possible at any cost. Every cross-walk you use you have to watch yourself for drivers turning left and right who aren't paying attention. Every four-way stop you have to look around and make sure that drivers are actually going to stop for you. Blocks are short, so this is all you're doing all the time. The sheer volume of infrastructure that's built for cars means there's not much left over. The only places to get that that sense of liberation back besides distant parks or suburbs well outside the municipal core. Any parks of non-trivial size in the city are filled to the brim with roads, many of which actually act as throughfare shortcuts for standard traffic most of the time (e.g. JFK in Golden Gate Park), so you're facing all the car problems as any other street. After a while it's hard not to be constantly on edge looking out for the next person who's about to do something dangerous to you, which is quite stressful and almost certainly has negative long-term mental effects. It really doesn't have to be the case though — contrast the car-first streets of San Francisco and other American cities to the pedestrian plazas and legitimately car-free urban parks of some cities and Europe, and it's a world of difference. We could be doing so much better.