How Walkable is Your Neighborhood?

Walk Score is a handy web-service that approximates the walkability of addresses and neighborhoods in the 40 largest cities in the US using an alogrithm – you can read about their entire methodology here – that takes into consideration proximity to stores, schools, parks and restaurants while weighing this information against the need for a car. With that in mind, their list of the top ten most walkable cities looks like this:

1. San Francisco
2. New York
3. Boston
4. Chicago
5. Philadelphia
6. Seattle
7. Washington, D.C.
8. Long Beach, Calif.
9. Los Angeles
10. Portland

Not surprisingly, these cities feature densely packed, economically diverse populations with access to areas that are a mix of residential, commercial and public spaces. Freakonomics takes this analysis further, finding other commonalities within the top rankings:

[T]he walkable list is dominated by Northeastern and West Coast cities that are comparatively old, at least by American standards. Six of the 10 most walkable cities were among the 20 largest urban places in 1900. By the 1950’s, these cities were largely mature; collectively, they grew only 1.5 percent in population between 1960 and 2000.

[M]ost of the pedestrian-friendly cities are products of the era of the foot and the hoof, with the steel wheel (i.e. the streetcar) coming along a bit later. Getting around cities in the age of muscle power was a difficult and slow proposition, so activities clung together in space to make travel to, from, and between them feasible. Dense districts were literally built for walking.

The converse of this, points to the reality of life in many cities today. Notably, as newer cities rose alongside the advent of the car, we fundamentally changed the ways we thought about and designed our environments. The challenge we face going forward then, is how to reverse this trend in order to take back our streets and re-envision our communities.

Related Post: End Our Oil Dependency: Walk More

Freakonomics: Taking Cities in Stride