As Good As It Gets

I, too, lived in Irvine for a bit so I'm familiar with what Kevin's talking about. It's what would happen if someone looked at suburbia and said, "all we need to do is make sure to add a few sidewalks and have shopping centers at regular intervals and we'll have built a walkable community." It's true that it is possible to walk places, and I think because of this it's an improvement over some suburban development. If your car breaks down, or you are too young to drive, you can still get to other places. Walking is possible. But, despite that Southern California weather, nobody does, and it isn't just a cultural thing. Things are built within walking distance, and there are sidewalks, but it still just isn't built with pedestrians in mind. You have to navigate giant parking lots, and cross multi-lane parkways with lights not timed with pedestrians in mind. You can walk, but I understand why nobody does. It just isn't pleasant.

So, no, I don't think it's as good as it gets. I think you can have development which is fundamentally suburban in character, mostly automobile-centric, but still much more pedestrian friendly. As Ryan Avent says:

If you build a lowish density neighborhood, separate the homes from the retail, and surround the retail by roads and parking lots, well, you’re not going to get walkers. If you try to make the development more like a small town, however, with residences over retail on the main strips, distributed retail throughout the neighborhood, and a fairly compact design, then you can get real walkability, to a certain extent, even with single-family homes and yards. And you can also follow the model in New England (and old England, actually) and drop that development onto a commuter rail line or transit connection, and then you’ve reduced driving still more, even as most or all residents of the neighborhood own and frequently use cars.

Instead of sidewalks+nearby strip malls, you need sidewalks+strips of "small town." The Main Line area of Philadelphia would be like this (and is a bit in places) if it had a bit more residential density near the main strip. Or, to be clear, it is like this except that it doesn't have enough residential density in enough places to make it consistently successful (plus a tendency to ruin a good thing by building more parking lots). Beach/resort towns are often like this, though their "residential density" often comes from hotel populations. I fled Irvine for Laguna Beach which, although not my idea of heaven, was at least genuinely a nice place to walk, and not simply because there's a beach there.