Edit: To elaborate on why it should be a right: it is not like in the olden days when you could walk to the store or your job. Everything is simultaneously dense and far thanks to how zoning works and cities being car-oriented. The right to mobility exists in America, but what if we took it further and made sure you really could go where you wanted without having to invest in a car?

Walkability isn't some relic of a bygone era that we can't have back again; it's just a feature of building your city correctly. Traditional development patterns still work better than any of the modernist alternatives we've tried, even in 2023.

In other words, the Suburban Experiment of the last 70 years wasn't actually the progress people thought it was. Instead, it was simply a fuck-up that we need to correct. As such, although mandating access to public transit would be nice to have, it's not actually the necessary solution here. What we actually need is simply to fix or even repeal the zoning code so that property owners are allowed to build appropriately again.