The hotshot team over at Walk Score is at it again. This time, they’ve ranked 25 major US cities based on transit.
No surprise, New York City takes the cake, pulling off an impressive 81. San Francisco, Boston, DC, and Philadelphia round out the top 5. The Northwest fares decently with Seattle coming in a #7 and Portland landing at #10.
The scores are calculated looking at frequency, types of routes, and stop locations on a block-by-block basis throughout the city, and then weighted by population density. (More methodology here.)
What struck me the most about these rankings is the discrepancy between walkable neighborhoods and bus-able neighborhoods. My house in Ballard boasts an impressive walk score of 95 (21 points higher than the Seattle average), but a measly transit score of 51 (8 points below Seattle’s average). This isn’t a total shock—Ballard has everything I could need close by, but transit can only really get me downtown efficiently.
Generally, cities with higher walk scores had higher transit scores, indicating that dense, walkable neighborhoods might go hand-in-hand with better transit (you usually walk to a bus stop, after all), but every city had a lower transit score than walk score, suggesting there’s still work to be done.
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