They are almost all locations that are centered around an institution, like a university or military academy where many people are housed very close to their classes or jobs and the concentration of people and buildings conspires to reduce the amount of spaces that could be used for roads and parking of automobiles.

In one of the recent threads, I asked for good local statistical sources and got a few gems, including the Bikes at Work census data commute-to-work mash-up by zipcode. So I ran a quick search on the highest walk to work locations in the US for towns over 1000 population. The results were surprising to me in the lack of diversity:



So I raised the threshold to at least 20,000 residents.



Location POP % Walk to work

Ithaca city, New York 29006 43.33%

Athens city, Ohio 21192 42.39%

State College, Pennsylvania 38420 41.8%

North Chicago, Illinois 36001 29.06%

Oxford city, Ohio 22087 28.86%

Fort Bragg, North Carolina 29246 26.13%

Cambridge, Massachusetts 101355 25.76%

Fort Hood, Texas 33595 23.87%

College Park, Maryland 24590 23.28%

Pullman city, Washington 24740 22.53%



And again, with few exceptions, we find the pattern of high walking rates and major institutions of higher learning, military bases and areas of mixed use development.

So I then raised the threshold again to over 250,000 residents:



Location POP % Walk to work

Boston, Massachusetts 589141 13.36%

Washington, DC 572059 12.27%

New York City, New York 8008278 10.72%

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 334563 10.02%

San Francisco, California 776733 9.82%

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 1517550 9.22%

Newark, New Jersey 273546 8.03%

Seattle, Washington 563375 7.72%

Baltimore, Maryland 651154 7.28%

Minneapolis, Minnesota 382452 6.85%



While all of these cities have colleges and universities and other major institutions, they are part of a very large mix and cannot alone account for why these cities are on the list. Even controlling for population density does not account for this distribution. It's clear that these are cities that grew to sizable populations before the automobile, which may explain why these major cities are on this list instead of Los Angeles, Phoenix, Atlanta, Houston and Dallas.

Surprising are two cities you might have expected to make this list: Chicago and Portland. They aren't that far off, but while both cities are getting a lot of credit for their green initiatives they don't seem to encourage walking to work as much as these cities above.

An even better question to assess walkability than % that walk to work would be the % that walk to the grocery store or pharmacy. We looked at Walkscore as a metric before and found it had flaws, but was generally useful.

From this very high level look at this census data and Walkscore, it would seem that there are two major factors that influence the walkability of a city or town.

1. Major Institutions: Colleges, Military Bases where people live in dorms/barracks close to their employment/education as well as dining/entertainment/social destinations

2. Pre-Auto City/Village Design: Places created before/without the need for automobiles with close mixed uses of residential/commercial/workplace/dining/grocery/education/entertainment.

The keys to both seems to be co-location of people's housing with the various destinations that they need/desire.

But there is a choice here that seems like one worth considering in greater depth. If we want to create a post-carbon society, creating more walkable communities seems like a major priority. But what kind of walking towns do we want?