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Notes -
Pack too many people in too little space.
Which excludes most of Manhattan.
But your claim was
Have you walked from Chelsea to Soho? I have, it takes a damn long time, and it's not a huge portion of the length of the island. If we're not talking just about Manhattan, crossing the East River on foot takes a long time itself -- the Brooklyn bridge is a mile long and the pedestrian path is often crowded. The Williamsburg bridge is even longer and has more of a climb. Cities aren't built to walking scale.
Yeah, it's 30 minutes. In those 30 minutes you see more inspired architecture and more Michelin starred restaurants than entire regions of the US. A good few grocery stores, a target, every fashion store that exists and some of the world's premier underground performance locations (Smalls Jazz, Comedy central). You'll cross effectively 100k people worth of housing, and all in a 30 minute walk, 10 minute bike share, or a 10 minute subway ride.
30 minutes in the traffic in LA, and you're still in traffic while having burned 200 fewer calories.
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...this is what makes a city, a city. Are you just opposed to the existence of cities?
I think it's clear from the other poster's previous comments that they mean a combination of walking and transit; not that you can walk literally everywhere. No one who lives in NYC would walk all over the entire city. I think you can understand this and are trying to make gotchas rather than engage in good faith.
"When you build for transit, everything is so close by that even walking is faster than a car."
That does not mean "a combination of walking and transit is faster than a car". It means that building for transit makes walking itself faster than a car.
You can continue to try to be overly literal for the sake of scoring fake points, or you can address the substantive argument being made. I'm not sure what you think you're accomplishing with the former.
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