Walking everywhere is not really much of an individual decision though: It's a collective, city-wide decision, as the city's infrastructure and geography decide

Walking everywhere is not really much of an individual decision though: It's a collective, city-wide decision, as the city's infrastructure and geography decides whether walking or driving are really alternatives. I was raised in a small city in Spain, population of 180k or so. I walked everywhere, and I still do when I visit: The city has great population density, with an average height of about 6 stories, plenty of pedestrian-only streets, and almost no surface parking. The situation is such that driving would be slower than walking to get most things done, as time to and from the car will often be quite the nuisance. Later I moved to Madrid. It's a very large city by European standards: Too big to just walk everywhere. However, it's also very dense, and it's also not all that well set up for driving in many routes. Driving might be useful at times, but the subway might be faster, and it's hard to find places that are more than 10 minutes away from a subway station. It's not quite as hostile as my hometown, but you at least might have to make choices. Now, however, I am living in a mid-sized metro in the US midwest: far smaller than Madrid in population, but easily 4x the total size. The vast majority of the metro area is single family homes in half acre lots. Even downtown is full of surface parking lots, so even living there you'll mostly be walking past asphalt. One person could possibly move to be in walking distance of their job, but good luck doing that with two people. Public transportation is sparse, and, at the best of times, has buses every half an hour, so your typical trip penalty vs a car might be an hour each way. And on top, temperatures will hit 40C in the summer, and -20C in the winter: Not exactly good walking weather either way. Here, walking is not a mode of transportation, but a completely intentional hobby which, in some cases, might take you past a store or a restaurant, weather permitting. So really, while I am a huge fan of walking, it's not something anyone in my metro area will willingly choose as their primary mode of transportation, and it's the same all over the US: Few of our cities are built for anything but cars, and it's a decisions that is really hard to undo without ripping apart most of the city's construction. Imagine one of our largest buildings: The headquarters of a company you probably know. well over 15 floors, but completely surrounded by surface level parking. Many thousands of spots, one for each worker. you have to walk over half a kilometer before you find any other building: otherwise it's just cars. So no, around here, I couldn't recommend walking to pretty much anyone, and that's because the decision is made for us. It's the city's urban planning department, over many decades, that decides whether people walk or not.