These are people who virtually never walk anywhere unless they have to, but you put them in the right environment and they almost can't help it.
Then I visited the US and quickly realised that this is a terrible idea in pretty much any American city.
My Houston experience was when I wanted to go to a nearby salsa place. It was about 3 blocks away from the motel, as the crow flies, but the other side of the interstate. It required a car to get there.
Leaving out the obvious cities (NY, Boston, DC Mall), I can think of half a dozen cities off the top of my head that have great walkability: Denver, Boulder, Portland, OR, Seattle, Chicago, Portland, ME, etc. I have wandered for hours in all those cities.
American cities have a higher proportion of unwalkable areas, but unwalkable areas exist in every city. I suspect that what is happening is that you are staying in areas of the city that aren't very walkable.
I don't think any of these cities have great walkability. They have acceptable walkability in certain areas, but great? Not even close.
A lot of Americans just have really low standards for what they consider walkable. Even in the core of larger US cities, walkability is often worse in practice than random little villages in, say, Germany.
Like, I live in the Seattle area now, and when I head to the denser areas, walking is okay, sure, but it's not especially pleasant the way it is in Munich. Walking in Munich was just nice, compared to a city like Seattle there's just typically wider sidewalks, more 'pedestrian plaza' type areas, more buffer between walking areas and cars, fewer cars, slower moving cars, roads are narrower and easier to cross, more pedestrian islands, more walk/bike cut throughs, fewer pedestrian 'beg buttons', the list goes on and on.
It’s also worth noting that Boulder’s main downtown area is dominated by Pearl Street, on which cars are not allowed ever. Denver has 16th street running from one end of downtown to the other, the only vehicles allowed there are free shuttles.
My point isn’t that American cities are more walkable, it is that it is silly to say that they all aren’t walkable as a rule as the GP said.
Is Barcelona a more walkable city than most American ones? Yes. Are there areas in Barcelona that you would be a fool to try and walk in? Also yes.
> Is Barcelona a more walkable city than most American ones? Yes. Are there areas in Barcelona that you would be a fool to try and walk in? Also yes.
My experience has been that it's matter of "what is the exception?" In Munich, most areas were (highly) walkable, areas that didn't feel walkable were an infrequent exception.
In Seattle, Capitol Hill is reasonably walkable yes, but areas like that or Belltown are the exception at least in terms of geographic area. Most parts of Seattle aren't really that walkable. They're still better than average for the US for sure, but far from great, or even good.
It's especially damning if you consider urban areas and what's part of the principal city. Munich takes up most of the immediate urbanized area (there are suburbs, of course, but they're mostly separated by farmland from Munich proper), and yet it's still mostly walkable. And even the surburbs do pretty well on walkability.
Seattle, though? Long before you reach the suburbs, you've mostly lost walkability, and the suburbs are mostly really walk-unfriendly except for little strips of downtown.
When I was in Munich I was living on the outskirts, we were less than a five minute bike ride to forests and horse paddocks, and yet I still had a general purpose grocery store in less than ten minutes by foot, and multiple options for that within a ~5 minute bike ride.