Walkable cities and public transportation based cities sound good but require you to trust the others on those streets and vehicles and you usually can't at all

Walkable cities and public transportation based cities sound good but require you to trust the others on those streets and vehicles and you usually can't at all if a city is super bad and the city itself has no intentions of fixing this. This is the perspective of an Alabamian who was blown away when an Australian I knew could just walk to a store to get stuff.