His solution isn't to make it suck less. His just says how great it is to live somewhere that was designed around walking because when the city was established that was pretty much the only option.

The Southern US is designed around cars because until fairly recently it was very sparsely populated, so everything had to be designed around cars and air conditioning in order to develop. It was the correct decision at the time, and changing it now is much more difficult than simply saying "be like this city that was established before the steam engine."