An accessible destination and an environmentally favourable journey are not the same urban good. Across 43 European cities, Willberg and colleagues construct school journeys as a standardised travel demand, derive walking accessibility and associate potential routes with monthly green-cover data. Inequalities are treated both between and within cities, with indices including Gini, Kolm–Pollak equally distributed equivalent and Moran's I. The central result is a recurring negative relationship between proximity and greenery: shorter access may expose a traveller to less vegetation. This is a strong correction to neighbourhood assessment by destination counts or green-space proximity alone. Yet the routes are modelled potentials, not observed diaries of journeys actually taken. The article therefore opens, rather than closes, a question about situated movement: which paths people choose, how routes change with season or care obligations, and whether their actual encounters reproduce the modelled trade-off. It supplies a rigorous comparative scaffold while making a case for locally recorded trajectories.