The original note, as written at the time
Think about it. You don’t have to be ferried by one vessel from start to destination. You can always be relayed between nodes through the segments. Consider relay circuits separated by wide multifunctional pedways. It is not the motorways that should be interrupting pedways, but the reverse. Service tunnels and bridges can always be factored in harmoniously for commercial and emergency purposes.
Ongoing development
You do not have to be ferried by one vessel from start to destination. You can be relayed between nodes through segments, on relay circuits separated by wide, multifunctional pedways.
And the inversion in the note is the important part: it is not the motorways that should be interrupting the pedways, but the reverse.
That sentence is a design policy and it would change a city overnight. Everywhere we build, the fast thing gets the continuous surface and the slow thing gets the interruptions — the footpath stops at the junction, the cycle lane ends at the roundabout, the pedestrian waits. Reverse it and the walking network becomes continuous while the vehicle network takes the breaks.
Relaying rather than riding through is the second idea, and it is how transit already works in the places it works well. A journey made of short hops between nodes is more resilient than one long line: a failure is local, capacity can be added to a segment, and the walk between segments is the thing that makes the trip pleasant rather than merely possible.
The cost is that every interchange is a design problem, and interchanges are where systems fail. A relay needs a node that a person can cross in a minute, in the rain, without a flight of stairs.
Service tunnels and bridges factored in for commercial and emergency use is the detail that makes it practical, because a pedway network with no service access is a network that cannot be repaired.
Design the walk first and the vehicle around it. That is the whole policy.