walkscoremap
Seattle’s Walk Score map, with the green showing the more “walkable” neighborhoods of the city.

Fewer and fewer Americans are driving these days, instead relying on public transit and their legs as a means of transportation.

This makes Walk Score’s ranking of the country’s most walkable cities and neighborhoods all the more interesting and the Seattle startup is out with its 2014 rankings today.

Walk Score — best known for placing a walkability rating of 1 to 100 on homes and businesses — crunched 10 million addresses and more than two billion walking routes to neighborhood amenities to find out which cities were most walkable.

New York City, unsurprisingly, finished first with a Walk Score of 87.6. San Francisco was second at 83.9, while Seattle cracked the top ten in eighth place.

Here’s the full list:

  1. New York (Walk Score: 87.6)
  2. San Francisco (Walk Score: 83.9)
  3. Boston (Walk Score: 79.5)
  4. Philadelphia (Walk Score: 76.5)
  5. Miami (Walk Score: 75.6)
  6. Chicago (Walk Score: 74.8)
  7. Washington, D.C. (Walk Score: 74.1)
  8. Seattle (Walk Score: 70.8)
  9. Oakland (Walk Score: 68.5)
  10. Baltimore (Walk Score: 66.2)

In Canada, Vancouver B.C. took the top spot with a score of 78, followed by Toronto and Montreal.

Walk Score breaks down each city by different neighborhoods. In Seattle, the most walkable areas are Downtown, Denny Triangle and Pioneer Square.

walkscoreseattle2014

Walk Score also ranks cities with a “Transit Score,” and “Bike Score.” The Transit rankings were similar to the top cities for walking, with New York first, San Francisco second and Boston third. But for “Bike Score,” Portland, Ore., ranked No. 1 overall with San Francisco and Denver following the Rose City.

Finally, the company put together a fun analysis showing the similarity of the most walkable cities with the metros that have the most venture capital financing. Based on data from The Atlantic Cities, it found that out of the top 10 most walkable cities, seven of those were also in the top 10 venture capital cities.

walkscoreVC

“The maps show that startups and people who want to work at startups prefer walkable cities,” Walk Score co-founder and CTO Matt Lerner told us.

Founded by All Star Directories creator Mike Mathieu, Walk Score secured $2 million last year from former Amazon.com CTO Shel Kaphan, former Facebook general counsel Rudy Gadre, entrepreneur Edward Yim, angel investor Geoff Entress and others. The company has seen a 50 percent growth for websites using Walk Score in the past six months.

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