| Most Americans live in metropolitan areas, but the vast majority of these metropolitan areas are extremely low-density, single-use suburbs. * The roads are long, winding, and poorly connected (so walking distances are excessive). This leads to ridiculous scenarios like https://usa.streetsblog.org/2013/02/28/sprawl-madness-two-ho... * The stores are generally large big-box stores that is often kilometers from ones' house; there are no small corner shops and restaurants, because they are illegal. * If you're still determined to walk, you probably need to cross large, high-speed roads with short crossing times, and your origin and destination are probably separated from the road by a large parking lot. And you may not even have sidewalks or crossing facilities. Example: https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Panera+Bread,+143+Alexander+... * Public transit in American suburbs is a joke. Because it's so hard to walk around, ridership is very low, making frequency hard to justify, causing even lower ridership. And this is before you consider that Americans are anti-tax American suburbs have an associated history with white flight post-segregation, so people often object to transit because it'll let "criminals" in So you wind up with situations like this Detroit man who walked 21 miles every day because he didn't have a car. https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/oakland/2015... |