At least some it has aspects in common with other collective action problems. (See many of the current discussions around remote work.) There's a perception, somewhat warranted, that if they can't persuade other people to adopt their preferences, it's going to be harder for they themselves to live in a world where teams are colocated, cities ban cars, there's more mixed use zoning, or whatever. And the arguments perhaps work better if they're framed in terms of productivity, environmental impact, etc. as opposed to "I like it this way better."
Housing and transportation seems to have two local maxima: car dependent or high density. A walkable high density area with apartments and mass transit. Or free roads, free parking, and sprawl that reinforce each other. If you try to bring a car to a dense area you become frustrated with traffic congestion and expensive parking and insurance. Likewise if you try to maintain an urban lifestyle in most of America you will be braving long waits for a bus and pedestrian hostile layouts.
As usual in this type of threads, I don't quite understand what Americans mean by 'walkability'.
When I was in high-school, I spent 2 weeks in the USA, on Long Island. I could walk for an hour and not walk across a pedestrian. There were often no sidewalk (when there were, I wasn't sure I could use them, as to my foreign eyes, being detached from the road, they where running though properties :-D ), but what's the problem with that? There was almost zero traffic, since the areas are low-density residential; much less than on my country roads. I could reach the ocean, I could reach playgrounds/playfields, I could reach one street with shops, I could reach... the high-school. No transit was needed. But I was alone in the streets/on the roads. I didn't understand why the older kid (16?) of the house was already driving a big car to go to high-school...
When I look at Google Maps, a huge proportion of those suburbs areas seem to be within a mile of a either a shop street or a supermarket, and often some playfield too (we don't have that many over here). The grid pattern makes access easier. So I am puzzled. It seems very 'walkable' to me. Of course accessing those supermarkets by foot or cycle ranges from unpleasant to maddening because access was generally only planned for cars. But that's much more easily fixable than redesigning the whole zones.
Now if you work 15 miles away, that's something else, but does this come into 'walkability' concept? No density is going to fix that: even in a big dense city, your job, or your next job (and even more your partner's!) is almost always going to end up on the other end of the city after some time. Walkability cannot help there, so I reckon jobs location shouldn't weight on the concept much.
I lived abroad in a pretty US-sprawl-like place. A huge majority of detached houses, a few rowhouses, a handful of short flats buildings, with supermarkets in place of the town centre. Basically no small shops, but a few bars between the supermarkets. I was living on one side of the town, and I was walking (winter) or cycling (summer) everyday to my workplace on the other side of the town, 2 rivers and 1.5 miles away. I would shop on the way back home. Easy, simple, practical. No transit is needed. For me it is walkable. But it seems it isn't, for many people I read here, because they would declare similar areas in the US as non-walkable.
I now live in a municipality, where density is 8 inhabitants / km² (20-25 inhabitants / sq mile). But most people live within half-a-mile of the village centre. It has enough small shops for your daily or weekly needs; if you wish, there's a bigger shop/small supermarket in the next village, 2 miles away. There's a guy who is over 80 years old and who lives at the farthest point in the municipality, 1 mile away. He comes shopping almost everyday, by foot, on the road that passes in front of my house. So for him I guess it is walkable. But what if we ask all the 40-something who live 4 times closer, but who prefer to take their car, and drive 2 times 10 miles to go a big supermarket. They'll swear they need their car, for those countrysides are not walkable! Heck, my neighbour works in the centre, that is one quarter miles away (5 mn walk, 1 mn bicycle) and takes her car to go to work.
It's not well-defined. To many people, it has a pretty high bar. For them, it means you can walk to most of the shops you need, restaurants, public transit options, etc. in a comfortable way. And, yes, it often assumes there's a multitude of jobs that can be accessed without a car because the need to own a car--tends to make it more difficult to live in a walkable neighborhood.
> There's a perception, somewhat warranted, that if they can't persuade other people to adopt their preferences, it's going to be harder
Sometimes it is true. Imagine you wish something like the Spanish town model: a very dense centre, and nothing else than the centre, so wherever you are in the town, you just walk/cycle/drive less than a mile and you are in the fields, the hills, or other forms of 'nature'. Density located in a single point would also enable easy and efficient point-to-point public transit between similar towns, by the way.
Anyway, you can't have this if you take the French route and allow suburban sprawl. It will spread 5 miles around in all (free) directions. Then it doesn't matter if you densify the centre (following the mantra "density is good and efficient" which we hear all the time here), people living in the centre (and most of the suburb) will not have access to 'nature' unless they use a car.
(What actually happens in terms of densification in France is generally worse, because densification of the sprawl is not made in the US style with huge buildings in a very dense, punctual, centre, but it is made along some axes or in some areas here and there. You end up with some average density everywhere, while the infrastructure hasn't followed. And cannot follow, because the density itself is spread, instead of being in a single point easily served. The elected from those areas say they want to combat sprawl, but they make it worse for everyone this way.)
On the other hand, I agree that cities, or urbanism in general, shouldn't be designed for what I call the 14-28, like it is often asked on this site. Or at least it should be the only goal and it shouldn't be the goal everywhere. What I mean by 14-28 is people who are in a great demand of interactions, who want to meet people, a lot of people (of course it depends on individuals, I just arbitrarily peeked those figures). It has always been like that, teens and young adults have always wanted to leave and discover the world, to multiply experiences, good and bad ones, and are attracted by the city lights. That's something we must acknowledge, and we'd better provide an environment for that.
BUT that must not be the end of all things. When people get a bit older and become parents, most of them
tone down and wish to be in less hectic areas, that's just a fact we can observe, even if it doesn't match our own ideal. And that's like it until their death, you can find a few people who will move to a city for their retirement but most who move will move the other way. Same for kids: until a certain age, they are satisfied with the presence of their parents, schools, and a handful of neighbouring kids, they have no need or desire of a large and dense city.
So most of their life, people don't care for having a big concentration of people where they live, and on the contrary favour a bit more space and a bit more quietness. Urbanism shouldn't blindly optimise for the former (density).
