This has less to do with the admittedly awful automobile-based society and more to do with the allocation of housing. High prices and low availability lead to people generally living randomly far away from their workplace. Soviet Union citizens for example accessed housing mostly through their labor union, and were allocated housing near their workplace so they could easily go walking or with public transit. It made cities very efficient with regards to commute, together with the division of urban areas into so-called "mikroraion" units, which established the concept of 15-minute neighborhoods already 70 years ago.