Weird - I visited Chicago a couple years ago from NYC and was shocked at how pedestrian-unfriendly central parts of Chicago seemed (e.g. River North). There were parking lots everywhere, with aggressive drivers pulling in and out. I walked through a parking lot to go to a liquor store and was almost run over. Sometimes crossing a large street felt like a race against the green light. Jaywalking signaled to drivers that they should speed up, which is the mark of a driver-run city IMO.
The whole experience contrasted heavily with the east coast cities like DC, Baltimore, Philly, NYC, Boston. Maybe it's changed in the last few years, though.
This makes sense to me. Street-level retail != walkability. Anyone who has tried to walk from a suburban stripmall to another right next door can attest to this.
That's where it's important to consider the often sprawling nature of suburbs and how they're inherently unwalkable. While that is definitely a problem, it seems to be a sprawling problem.
Its not a suburb or sprawl problem. It's a car problem.
I now live in Manhattan, the most densely populated chunk of the US. Any time I walk somewhere I spend about half the time waiting for lights so that I can safely cross a street.
Well, I don't disagree at all, but would argue that it's kind of a circular dependency problem. Sprawl would exist without cars to be sure, but cars make it much easier to expand, which increases dependency on cars, which supports sprawl. Then the people who have moved outward use their cars to work in the city because there's nothing in the suburbs and a poorly designed city (or one that is dependant on the people with cars) prioritizes that.
Well, suburbia started becoming a thing long before cars and comes from the Greeks. However, I don't think the kind of cities you see today would necessarily have expanded so far without cars. They are not a book to cities or density from what I can tell.
As someone who walks in Manhattan, I see where you're coming from, but my experience differs. Specifically, 99% of the time I'm walking in Manhattan, I'm not trying to get somewhere on the same street or avenue I started on, so I can turn and walk along whatever block to avoid the lights. Plus (at least in the 40s), there are plenty of subway entries/passages where you don't need to pay but can pass through to get underneath the street - and buildings you can pass through as well. Of course, figuring out this maze is half the "fun" of walking in Manhattan.
River North is also an unusual neighborhood in Chicago - there are dozens of walkable little downtowns in other neighborhoods across the city, but RN is an abomination and I usually try to get out of it quickly whenever I find myself there.
A lot has changed. In the last five years dozens of new skyscrapers have been built in the CBD (The Loop, River North, Near North, West Loop, etc...). Scrolling through Chicago Architecture web site [0] will give you an idea of the level of rapid development.
The whole experience contrasted heavily with the east coast cities like DC, Baltimore, Philly, NYC, Boston. Maybe it's changed in the last few years, though.