New York: 39th Most Walkable City?

If I were asked to list the top 10 most walkable cities in the United States, I'd definitely have to pick New York, Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco in my top 10. Not so for Prevention Magazine, which rated Madison, Wisconsin, as their number one. Admittedly, I might be inclined to agree if I had been there, but I haven't been. I might even include Austin in my top 10, as they did (it was #2, ahead of San Francisco!). But New York came in at #39 (behind Wichita, Kansas). That strikes me as, to say the least, bizarre.

From CNN ("Top 10 cities for taking a stroll," CNN, March 8, 2007):

Madison was the only city in the walking top 10 in a state that's not in the South or the West, a point of pride for people like Kathy Andrusz, coordinator of the Fit City initiative. Started in 2003 by Mayor Dave Cieslewicz, the program is a collaboration between Madison city officials and more than 30 other groups to combat obesity and get people moving.

Of course, there is a certain fundamental unfairness to some of the criteria Prevention used:

• % of pop that walks for exercise
• Use of mass transit
• Parks per square mile
• Points of interest per squre mile
• Avg winter/summer temperatures
• % of athletic shoe buyers

New York probably gets a lot of kudos for the second point. Mass transportation is as big or bigger than driving to get around NYC. As far as parks go, there are quite a few, but perhaps not enough (which, actually, as far as walking is concerned is possibly a good thing because parks could possibly interfere with street life by cutting off neighborhoods). New York's points of interest per square mile (whatever that means) is probably hard to beat, given New York's population density.

But the first point immediately skews the result away from New York: why do New Yorkers need to walk for exercise as much as, say, someone from the suburbs when walking is already such a big part of their daily lives? Many New Yorkers walk to work, walk home, walk to transit, and walk for the hell of it. Likewise, why would they need athletic shoes to walk? I walk in the same shoes I work in, which aren't fancy. And, as far as I'm concerned, cold is no excuse for not walking.

Food for thought: Newark, NJ, was #100.