> Are you unable to walk around your neighborhood in SV, Seattle and other places?
Of course walking is possible. It's just generally some combination of useless and highly unpleasant[1].
Let me give you an example of what I mean: in SV, I mostly recently lived in a mobile home park. The mobile home itself was largely fine, it was brand new when we moved in actually, and because it's a Silicon Valley mobile home park, the usual stereotypes don't really apply. However, it's true that in design, walking out of it was simply unpleasant: it's just bare asphalt, all the way out. Then once you exit, there's some typical America land use, there's sidewalks sure, but right past the sidewalks are small seas of asphalt in front of each business.
Then you get to the street. It's El Camino Real, a pretty normal sized arterial by US standards, but by the standards of Munich the road is ludicrously huge: there's enough space for car parking on each side, then 3 lanes of traffic on each side, and often one or two lanes for turning near intersections.
Right across the street from our mobile home complex, there's a large Korean grocery store that we liked, and as the crow flies it's only a few minutes' walk away. BUT, as you might guess, we have to walk to a nearby intersection to go across (it's far too wide to jaywalk, unlike most 'commercial' streets in Munich), where there's a crosswalk. The crosswalk has to cross about 10 lanes' width or so of road. In theory, if you look like you're trying to cross, drivers are legally obliged to stop. You can probably guess how well that goes: you have to either wait for a natural break in traffic, or put your life on the line and hope that drivers see in you time. It fucking sucks, and so far I've seen no equivalent to this in Munich, they're tremendously better with supporting pedestrian crossings (for example, pedestrian islands are easily an order of magnitude more common, maybe two orders of magnitude). It simply felt terrible to get to that store, and there's no way I'd ever send my 7 year old son to walk there by himself, whereas I'll gladly send him off to walk or bike an equivalent distance here in Munich to stores or school.
The Seattle suburb (Mercer Island), the apartment complex we lived in was actually quite nice, but there was almost nothing of interest within easy walking distance of it. It was just residential housing for quite a ways, which is standard in the US, but much less common here. Here on the outskirts of Munich, I think I have like 4 grocery stores (small ones, of course) within a ~5 minute walk, a couple different bakeries, a few fitness centers, and other various shops and the like.
Honestly, I could go on and on, the differences are absolutely massive. If Munich is an NFL team for walk-friendly land use and urban design, your average US city is a junior high school's backup squad. It's really that bad.
> But if you want to put in the steps, you just need ground to walk on
You're confusing an individual suggestion with possible societal solutions. "People should just, like, walk more" is never going to solve the problem. Period. The people in the article don't walk 16,000 steps per day for their health, they do it in the process of conducting their daily business. It being really healthy is just a pleasant side effect.
It's the exact same reason the Dutch are champions of active transportation (walking/biking) in the Western World: they've built infrastructure so that walking and biking are actually useful and comfortable, and so people naturally get exercise in the course of their daily routine. Telling people to pull themselves up by their exercise bootstraps as its own independent thing will never, ever work. You will find nowhere in the developed world, where people broadly exercise that much, consistently, for its own sake.
To be blunt, you don't have to just trust me, as the data supports my narrative. NYC is probably viewed as the most walk-friendly major city in the country, right? If not #1, at least way up there, along with SF, Boston, etc. Do you know what its walk modal share is, for trips? A whole 6%. Munich's walk modal share? 28%, more than 4x as high. And Munich isn't some weird outlier here for Germany, Hamburg and Berlin are about the same.
If walking in the US didn't suck, people would do it more. But they don't. Because for transportation, it's useless and unpleasant and dangerous.
> When I visited SV it didn't seem too bad downtown.
Two things, first a nitpick: Silicon Valley is not a city. There is no "Silicon Valley downtown". Silicon Valley is a sub-metro-level region comprising a bunch of cities. In my case, I grew up in Santa Clara, most recently lived in Sunnyvale, and worked in Mountain View.
Second thing, the fact that you picked out 'downtown' specifically is actually a very strong Americanism, the expectation that only downtown really should be/has to be walkable. Many other developed countries don't have this (frankly really silly) notion, in places like Germany or France or Japan it's walkable all over the place, even small towns of a few thousand people, because why shouldn't it be? I live nowhere close to Munich's city center, I'm actually near the outskirts (there's a BMX park and forest a few minutes away by bike). And yet walking here is still much nicer and more useful than the downtowns of nearly all US cities.
[1] - And unpleasantness for walking is very important, you're not surrounded by an expensive machine that lets you control your environment, and unpleasantness for walking and biking is often a proxy for unsafe-ness.