For many of us, cities that are easier to traverse on foot are better places to live. If you’re one of those people, you might be curious to know which of America’s cities actually are the most walkable. A new study by the real estate and brokerage website Redfin breaks it down.
Top image via Shutterstock
Surprise! New York, the city where you’d have to be batsh*t crazy to drive to work, wins.
Image: Jody Sieradzki / Dadaviz
For each of the 3000 largest cities in the United States, Canada and Australia, Redfin scored every individual block based on how easy it is to do all sorts of daily tasks — getting your groceries, taking your kid to school, etc. Redfin then weighed each block score by the number of people living on that block and calculated a weighted average “walk score” for the entire city. While some of America’s most walkable cities probably won’t come as a surprise — New York, San Francisco, Boston and Philly all got big before automobiles, and were planned with foot traffic in mind — others, like Miami, and Oakland, show us that history isn’t all that matters.
Miami, for its part, has watched its walk score increased more than 3 points since 2011, thanks to a surge in commercial development and a trend toward increasing population density in certain downtown neighbourhoods. Detroit didn’t make the top ten, but the Motor City has experienced a similar downtown revitalization and seen its walk score climb 2.2 points over the past three years. (And if you’re a biker, you might be interested to learn that Detroit comes in #3 on Redfin’s most bikeable list, after the usual suspects Portland and San Francisco.)
You can get the full scoop on America’s most walkable, bikeable, and public transit-able cities here, and even see how your specific block ranks on all three counts. [Redfin]