You get a completely different sense of a city from walking through it compared to other modes. This may be due to:
- seeing buildings on smaller streets or from the street level
- seeing people’s faces
- spending much more time to get from point A to point B
- physical exertion?
- “exposure” to air and to all senses vs. being enclosed
In this way, you can get a much more lifelike feeling of a city’s streets than you would by driving or taking long distance transit. However, you wouldn’t be able to cover as much ground since walking is slow. Biking seems like a happy medium where you’re going fast enough to traverse neighborhoods yet slow enough to experience the surrounding life at a human scale.