The Boston Traveler

Boston Is Made for Walking

by Chandra on December 5th, 2007

I knew it!

The results of a recent study titled Footloose and Fancy Free: A Field Survey of Walkable Urban Places in the Top 30 U.S. Metropolitan Areas confirmed what I’ve suspected for quite some time: Boston is one of the best locations in the United States to live if you enjoy walking. The city placed second in the Walkable Urbanism report, behind only Washington, DC.

I first realized how easy it is to get around Boston by foot when I decided to take an off-campus job downtown during graduate school. The position would allow me to earn more money than teaching alone (Boston is a very expensive place to live, you know) and recoup after endless hours of brain-numbing study by getting away from it all on weekdays.

So, like any logical person, I called the transit department for train directions to my destination. I was unfamiliar with the area then, but it took no more than three lunch breaks for me to notice that just about every train stop in metropolitan Boston is no more than two or three blocks from the last one. Some are even as close as one block or less, such as the Park Street and Boylston Street stations on the edge of Boston Common.

From that realization on, I started walking almost everywhere I have to go, and I’m not alone. The Footloose study conducted by Christopher B. Leinberger—a land use strategist, real estate developer, and current visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC—is only a preliminary attempt to quantify the relationship between the numerous factors that make a city more conducive to walking than others. But, I can’t argue with the overall results, which provide additional evidence why Boston is a great city to visit, especially when the weather’s good (unlike now—Brrrrrr!!!).

The top ten walkable cities in the United States as determined by Leinberger’s walkable urbanism study are:

1. Washington, DC
2. Boston, Massachusetts
3. San Francisco, California
4. Denver, Colorado
5. Portland, Oregon
6. Seattle, Washington
7. Chicago, Illinois
8. Miami, Florida
9. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
10. New York, New York

If this particular subject matter is up your alley, you can get a copy of Footloose and Fancy Free for your own in-depth reading and/or learn more about walkable urbanism at the Brookings Institution website.

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