Walk Score Top 25 City Ranking for American Cities (better, rates, population)

[MDAllstar]

I haven't seen a thread discussing Walk Score in years so I thought it would be interesting to get an update on the rankings. Here are the top 25 most walkable cities according to Walk Score. Obviously, Walk Score isn't perfect, but it does provide a benchmark. I only provided the principal city in each metro area as the major city for that region, but I did include secondary cities like Oakland and St. Paul.

2021 City & Neighborhood Ranking

1. San Fran = 88.7
2. NYC = 88.0
3. Boston = 82.8
4. Chicago = 77.2
5. DC = 76.7
6. Miami = 76.6
7. Oakland = 75.3
8. Philly = 74.8
9. Seattle = 74.4
10. Minneapolis = 71.4
11. LA = 68.6
12. Portland = 67.3
13. Buffalo = 66.6
14. Honolulu = 65.7
15. St. Louis = 65.7
16. Baltimore = 64.3
17. Pittsburgh = 62.4
18. Milwaukee = 61.5
19. Denver = 61.2
20. St. Paul = 60.4
21. New Orleans = 58
22. Cleveland = 57.1
23. San Diego = 53.3
24. Detroit = 51.1
25. Richmond = 50.9

[TheTimidBlueBars]

Surprised Canadian cities like Calgary and Edmonton aren't doing better.

I have always called Spokane an underrated urban city and this list bears that out; it's on par with Madison, San Jose, and Cincinnati.

Learned today that there's a Canadian city with 240k people that I've never heard of before, Longueuil, a suburb of Montreal.

[Kaszilla]

I feel like Philly's score is too low

[FL_Expert]

Not sure how Miami is ahead of Philly and Seattle.

[mhays25]

It's about proximity, not infrastructure, urban form, or actual walk rates.

[585WNY]

Rochester should be #20 unless there’s a population cutoff, but then Honolulu wouldn’t be listed.

[Losfrisco]

Denver and Toronto are pretty much even in walk score.

[annie_himself]

Originally Posted by Losfrisco

Denver and Toronto are pretty much even in walk score.

Are you saying the methodology is so flawed that it brings Denver up?

[2Easy]

Walk scores for an entire city isn't very useful imo. It's really only useful for making a ranking list.

[Losfrisco]

Originally Posted by annie_himself

Are you saying the methodology is so flawed that it brings Denver up?

More like flawed to bring Toronto down.

The only methodology I saw described was something along the lines of "people walking to run errands."


So unless somehow Toronto, with hundreds of thousands of downtown residents, is leading some kind of double life as a covertly car centric city, I think they should be somewhere between NYC and Chicago.

The only thing I can think of that might bring it down is less actual rail coverage in miles (though they have over 2X the ridership of Chicago CTA).