I'll never understand why we continue to design our suburbs for cars and driving with no attempt to encourage walking. Instead, we seem to discourage walking through a lack of sidewalks, concentration of destinations surrounded by parking lots a mile wide themselves, and burying houses in subdivisions that require almost a mile walk just to get out of.
I've talked to many coworkers over the years who live in newer subdivisions without sidewalks. When mcmansions are so close together that you can stretch arms and touch two house at once, and no one has a backyard bigger than my garage, not having people walk in front of your house is seen as a privacy thing. Like, if you grew up in a "normal" house and then got stuck in a mcmansion subdivision and now your lawn is only roughly the size and dimensions of a driveway, you get kind of sensitive about what little you have. They see it as uncomfortable or creepy that I have sidewalks and are even more weirded out about the fact I actually use the sidewalks for after dinner walks like many of my neighbors, so I'm creepy for walking past houses and waving "hi" and stuff. Its kind of like non-nudists don't much understand nudists and vice versa. Which is getting a bit off topic but being a privacy and personal space type of thing is sorta on topic anyway. I think they're also weirded out by the bowl of spaghetti road designs, such that people seem to appear out of thin air 20 feet away and then disappear, unlike a more civilized street grid like where I live (about 60 years old, the house, not me (yet)) So hopefully that data provides some insight.
(edited to add it might be a territorial thing, like a dog. People raised to think 30 feet from their house is "theirs" are going to have weird attitudes about personal space when placed in a house with a front yard thats less than 5 feet deep, compared to a dude who lives on a one acre plot of land)
