Walkable US cities.

[Big Pun]

Didn't see a thread for this. I'm interested in the most walkable/best laid out cities in the US. There is https://www.walkscore.com/ but I'm not sure how much to trust it. Does it seem pretty reliable?

I plan on forever owning a car but I'd prefer not to rely on it to perform every function of life. For the sake of the thread, I'm considering anything with over 100,000 people a city.

I'll start with Augusta, GA. Not walkable at all. The downtown area that is the closest to being walkable doesn't even have a nearby grocery store. Not many mixed use areas.

 

[Texasmade]

NYC and SF I imagine are fairly walkable. Any city in Texas is not walkable.

 

[SixOhNine]

Portland is pretty compact, and the public transit is good.

 

[Big Pun]

I haven't spent much time in the Northeast but I would think that since a lot of their cities were built before cars were invented they'd have sensible layouts. I read this book https://www.amazon.com/Geography-Nowhere-Americas-Man-Made-Landscape/dp/0671888250 and it made me think about how absurd and inefficient most places are. The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs also addresses this problem.

 

[mistersparkle]

American cities I have been to with decent public transportation where I didn't need a car to get around:

NYC
Boston
DC
Chicago
Austin
Seattle
Portland
SF

Footnotes:
Austin gets really hot in the summer. And it feels very much like a college town, so I don't know if it's somewhere I'd like be when I'm in my late 20s/30s. Seattle has decent public transportation, but with a lot of bottlenecks (bridges), so commuting to work may be bad during rush hours. Boston and Chicago have deathly cold winters.

 

[ballmouse]

Austin might be more walkable if you live downtown, but the few people I know who live there live outside downtown and I don't think there's much public transit to commute to work for them.

 

[Big Pun]

Has anyone been to Madison before? I may be moving there