The person you're replying to assumes that transportation and demand to live/work/spend money in the city has such a high baseline volume that the city will always be relatively prosperous and the experience of walking in the city is the bottleneck when it comes to making the city better. This is fine if your world view doesn't extend beyond existing large cities. It's like being rich and complaining about having to maintain your vacation homes. Most smaller cities can't take that high baseline amount of economic activity and prosperity for granted so they need to balance luxury stuff like walk-ability, nice parks, etc. with making it easy and cheap to engage in commerce. Luxuries like walk-ability and parks are second to building up a baseline amount of (hopefully diverse) economic activity that won't go away at the next downturn.