Walking in Seattle
| I have a feeling that the folks at the Brookings Institution who put together a report that ranks the 30 biggest metropolitan areas in the US on their “walkability” never tried crossing the street downtown on a rainy day where the cell-phone-yakking drivers of unnecessarily large vehicles add insult to injury by soaking you with the spray from their tires just after they almost run you over because if they had, I’m sure we would have ranked somewhere lower than number six on the list. (You can read a nice article about the list here.) |  |
The report uses a number of measures to create their walkability index–number of unique “places” in the metro area, population of the metro area as a whole, number of people per Place, rail transit number service, percentage of places served by rail transit and rail transit system size.. | photo by Seattle Bon Vivant |
A quick skim of the introduction to the report [#] makes it obvious that the guy who did the reporting has a very, very strong bias in favor of rail transit. Observant readers may have noticed that we don’t, in fact, have a rail transit system in place right now. Nevertheless, we did outrank cities that do have one, cities like Chicago and New York. (Take that! all you “transit is so much better out East” whiners. Ha ha, just kidding. I actually agree with you.)
The top five cities on the list were Washington, DC, Boston, San Francisco, Denver and Portland. If it were up to me, SF would win but that’s just because I don’t think I could ever stop being thrilled to ride a cable car.
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I think that the thrill of the cable car wears off pretty quickly when you’re at the bottom of a hill on a cold night waiting behind hundreds of tourists for a spot. But I’m cynical like that.
I had to laugh about trying to cross the street downtown. I remember the days (not that long ago, really) when Seattle folks would stop for you. Coming from the east coast, I had to get used to this -are they really stopping to let me cross the street? Now, that doesn’t happen nearly as often as does almost getting run down by drivers!
Nice blog….