Then why not mention that walkable communities are better.

You fundamentally just cannot fit the entire necessary amount of goods that an entire community of people needs within walkable distance.

You absolutely 100% can fit the common things they need day to day, like a doctor, optometrist, dentist, grocery, convenience store, vet, etc within walkable distance.

But there’s a behemoth of random other junk that people want/need, and everyone is diverse. They have their own hobbies, their own needs, and you cant cram all of that within walkable distance, period.

You’re gonna have random people that want to order LEGO, people into knitting, people into carpentry, people into skiing, people into kayaking, etc etc etc etc. The list is borderline infinite.

You need those to be somewhere within distribution distance, which is a very large radius (~100km is pretty reasonable), it can be an entire city over even.

But when you scope out to an entire city of people with a population in seven digits, you will check off pretty much every box you can think of.

So if you have a few thousand Kayakers distributed across a ~100km radius between 2~3 towns/cities, you really dont benefit from having the mom and pop kayak shop having like 8 locations to try and reach them all.

If they have 1 single warehouse where they make, store, and manage their kayak orders and simply just deliver them out to order, that pretty much always is simultaneously more cost effective, cheaper, and better for the environment.

Compared to if those ~thousand or so kayakers make individual trips to their nearest stores to buy a kayak.