Pedestrian congestion is a big problem in lots of major urban centers. Go down to Shibuya Crossing in Tokyo or Times Square in NYC and you'll find the same problem of big crowds of people clogging areas that weren't designed to accommodate the sheer volume of traffic.
Idk if I'd call it "unnecessarily long travel" so much as "a necessary consequence of this many people living in a limited space". If you don't want that level of crowding, you've got to move outside this hyper-dense city.