Published July 23, 2008
by iris_author
I am currently in Boston (well Cambridge really), my old residence of years past. Like my subsequent five year sojourn in Toronto, I never needed a car in what Prevention Magazine cited as the number one walkable city in America. Indeed, this fact is proclaimed quite proudly with a sign in front of Cambridge City Hall. Moreover, the fact that Boston's Logan Airport itself is connected to the subway system makes an even bigger regional difference when you realize that Pearson Airport in Toronto is one of the traffic epicentres of the entire country.
The Walk Score web site puts Boston as a whole at number three behind San Francisco and New York City on its walkability index. Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Seattle, Long Beach, Los Angeles (!), and Portland round out the top ten. Not surprisingly, these are also the top American cities that I could live in.
At HuffPo, the least walkable cities are also highlighted. Not surprisingly, these grotesque car dependent cities are almost all located in the South, where a culture of American individualism has metastized into a anti-social nightmare of unaccountable ecological choices. It is no wonder that the South is also trapped within a reactionary political culture which reinforces these trends, even as the built environment neutralizes collective action and community spirit.
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