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Why wouldn't you be able to walk to a park in a dense urban area? Or go kayaking or shooting (presumably at a range, not in your backyard)? Gardening is a bit more difficult, depending on how dense the city is exactly. On the other hand, in an urban area, you could be 3 minutes away from shops without even needing to drive.
I have driven into the local major urban center and walked around. It's okay. There are crazy drug addicted homeless people, shit on the ground, rents are ruinously high for tiny apartments that don't include storage space for kayaks or workbenches, half the schools are crap, etc. But some of the parks are not open drug markets and I indeed could walk around them with a little kid. But the parks near my suburban home have 0.0% homeless person poop on the ground and are also nice, so instead I'll walk to them. If you and I walked through one park then the other the differences would be clear.
I've been to state parks and BLM land countless times across decades. 0% of the people using them got there by bus or light rail. It is a very anti-walkable-city sort of activity. You need significant personal storage space such as a garage and you need a personal vehicle to access these spaces. There's no rental shops for kayaks or bikes and no bus stops on the mountain side or BLM desert land or lake, etc.
Indeed I don't shoot in my suburban backyard. I'm imagining a "walkable urban space" shooter trying to bring a couple rifle cases and a range bag on a bus out to an outdoor shooting range. I don't suppose that is realistically possible. To within round off error that's not viable. Load it in your personal car and drive to the range or you can't do it.
My very suburban dad activities are not expensive. I'm dishing out single digit thousand dollars for these things. But it absolutely requires a moderate amount of storage space and a personal vehicle. Given that I might as well live on the moon from the point of view of a walkable city advocate.
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On good days, it'll be packed with other people using the park.
Unfortunately many cities tend to be bad about even letting residents have guns, let along shoot them anywhere. And where are you going to kayak in the concrete jungle?
Sure, 3 minutes away from 3 shops; all the rest are just as far as in the suburbs except it's a public transit journey instead of driving.
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