Seattle isn’t as easy to get around as New York or San Francisco when it comes to traveling by foot, but it’s still fairly simple to navigate without a car.
According to the new Walk Score report from Redfin, which ranks cities with populations over 300,000, the Emerald City ranks No. 8 in walkability in the United States. New York, San Francisco and Boston take the top three spots respectively. Seattle landed an overall score of 70.8, compared to New York’s walk score of 87.6 and San Francisco’s score of 83.9.
Seattle’s Walk Score is unchanged from 2014, Redfin reports, with people in Seattle being able to “walk to an average of two restaurants, bars or coffee shops in five minutes.”
To calculate a city’s Walk Score, Redfin analyzed “over 10 million locations and computed more than 2 billion walking routes for 2,500 U.S. cities.” The Walk Score is determined by an algorithm that also takes into account nearby amenities, pedestrian friendliness, population, whether a neighborhood is mixed use (residential and businesses), and data from Walk Score users.
Redfin purchased Walk Score last October to “give folks a complete portrait of what it would be like to live somewhere new, within the house and in the surrounding neighborhood,” according to their site.
For those looking at real estate, Redfin also posts transit and bike score breakdowns for Seattle neighborhoods. Not surprisingly, several of the cities’ most popular neighborhoods also boast high walk scores, including Capitol Hill with 90, Ballard at 91, Belltown at 96, and the home of Amazon, South Lake Union, coming in at 97. To find your neighborhood’s walk score, you can enter your address here.
Below, the five most walkable neighborhoods in Seattle, according to Walk Score, which also gives handy info like bike and transit scores, along with ease of access to amenities, including restaurants and shops.
