Walk On
- Posted by: GOOD
- on April 18, 2009 at 9:00 am
A look at America’s most pedestrian friendly cities
Walking is arguably the most efficient mode of transportation, and you don’t need petroleum to power it; some French fries will do. But disturbingly few of us take advantage of our built-in bipedal locomotion function. Are we to blame, or is it our environment?
A website called Walk Score aims to answer that question. It ranks U.S. cities based on their “walkability,” a proprietary formula that measures population density, pedestrian-friendly design, public space, schools and businesses, and commerce.
Its algorithm is, admittedly, imperfect. It doesn’t, for example, consider a city’s public-transit infrastructure, nor does it account for features of the built environment—like block length, frequency of crosswalks, topography—or natural beauty, which influence walkability. But the site’s editors are impressively committed to improving their methodology, and they’re even more committed to making walking policy a more important part of the national discussion about transportation by pushing for changes in the 2009 Transportation Bill.
Here are the current top 10 most walkable cities in the country, and a graph of their walk-score distribution.
A city’s Walk Score is the average of the walk scores (from one to 100) of all the neighborhoods in a city. The graphs show Walk Score Distribution—the range of scores of the neighborhoods in each city.
Walk Score
LEARN MORE walkscore.com
DISCUSSION: 14 Comments
I’m from New York, go to college in Boston, and have been to San Francisco, so I’m not surprised at their taking the top three. All wonderful places to go for strolls.
By that I mean: They are all wonderful places in which one might take a stroll. Not that one should travel to those places for the express purpose of strolling. That would just be silly. :/
Not at all, my dear Larry V. People travel to go on walks through mountain ranges, hills, valleys. No reason why they shouldn’t travel to walk through cities too.I’m from Bangkok. The definition of pedestrian-unfriendliness. I suspect the Walk Score here would be about 6.
I live in Washington, DC. Unfortunately, the most walkable neighborhoods are the least affordable. I wonder if there are cities or neighborhoods where that does not hold true.
how did LA even make this list, you can’t mail a letter without getting on the freeway.
This is a great idea, but they do need to work on their method. My neighborhood got a 55, but there aren’t even any sidewalks, except on one of the two busy cross-streets that I am close to, and only on one side of that street. It doesn’t even extend to the park.I think putting in sidewalks, especially in the midwest should be a part of a national health initiative. We are killing in obesity here, there are beautiful landscapes, and yet everyone just drives right past them.
I live in Minneapolis and am impressed with the city’s progressive approach towards foot power, pedal power, and public transportation. More can and should be done (by us all), but I wonder how much weather factored into the study.
Portland = 66?? Get real.
It should be pointed out that on the right sidebar of this page is a link to a blog essay titled, “The Great Los Angeles Walk.” The first two sentences: “Yeah, so nobody walks in Los Angeles. It’s a tired trope but it’s true.”Besides that wildly inaccurate conclusion, I think this list seems pretty accurate.
Tallahassee, FL = 92!Why isn’t on the list?!?
When you take individual LA neighborhoods (ok, not large parts of the Valley or the hills), a large percentage of them are quite walkable with close access to the main boulevards and all their attendant stores, post offices, restaurants, etc. But if you take the city as a whole, getting around on foot proves to be a more challenging exercise.
I like to go to cities just to walk around them. I never thought of trying that in LA, but I did walk around in Bangkok. What makes Boston such a great walking city is having transit around so you don’t always have to walk roundtrip, or if the weather changes. What made Seattle truly walkable was that you can now get bus directions from google maps on the iPhone. Otherwise taking buses just after showing up in town is confusing, and Seattle is too big to really walk between neighborhoods (within them, it’s great).
Strange, mentioned doing this to a friend a few weeks ago and she told me i was crazy. Since I have no job and lots of time…
[...] major markets and found that in 13 of the 15 markets, higher levels of walkability, as measured by Walk Score, were directly linked to higher home values. (If you are not familiar with Walk Score, it [...]