What a weird tone for that article! Acts like the game developers were out to cheat people out of understanding reality.
Also, it's humantransit, which specifically promotes walking, cycling, etc. so they're going to be understandably annoyed when the cited inspiration for plenty of city planners understates the negative impact of car dependence.
Foot paths are very good for traffic without congestion which makes perfect sense. What doesn't make sense is the complete lack of time or distance limit meaning the population will happily walk a massive pedestrian walkway the length of an entire sector.
A somewhat more realistic way is to use subways to link your high density residences with no highway access to places like work and retail while leaving the roads for mostly delivery trucks and emergency services. Apparently Japanese developments were practically planned this way - adding to where a new subway loop and putting housing on top for synergy.
How far is sector? What would you consider reasonable walking distances? Something like 30mins regularly, 60-90mins occasionally?
Single data point: I'm a pedestrian. I haven't owned a car in over a decade. I'm willing to walk up to 30 minutes regularly and farther occasionally. I also use public transit sometimes.
People walking as a mode of transit aren't competing with joggers for who gets there first. These times are for planning purposes.
Of course, it's okay if you walk faster than that. But planning departments need to look at "Who will actually walk this?" And the answer is "Ordinary people will walk it if it isn't over 30 minutes, but 15 minutes is better. And that works at these distances."
You see the most traffic from establishments within a quarter mile, and some additional traffic within the half mile radius but outside the quarter mile. It drops off steeply outside of the half mile radius.
While I get that tolerances vary I think walking marathons is a bit unreasonable for a commute and should probably draw complaints and lower desirability like congestion about things being too far away.
It could be a case of differing norms admittedly. Reminds me of one complaint from an online friend in Southern California about how Civilization used an unrealistically dark color for the ocean - she was used to a lighter blue compared to the more northern ocean color chosen. Both colors are realistic but assumptions differed and varying it visually would be confusing for gameplay reasons.
Anyway I would probably set the game limit to a fraction of a typical service radius (perhaps specifically setting it based on age and health) or make it more consistent with their sidewalk preference behavior. Like say if the walking distance for children was the radius of a small elementry school but for teens it was half the radius of the high school.