Seattle is 8th most walkable city in the US, study finds

Seattle has some supremely walkable areas—we specifically called out the International District and First Hill last month. But how does the city as a whole stack up?

Walk Score, the Redfin-owned company that’s become the industry standard for quantifying walkability, has released their annual national rankings. Seattle ranks eighth, with a Walk Score of 73.1, or very walkable. Not too shabby.

The seven cities that outpace us include San Francisco, Chicago, and Miami. Topping the list is, of course, New York City, with a citywide Walk Score of 89.2.

Things haven’t changed much for us since last year. Our score increased just a fifth of a percent, and our national ranking stayed the same—in fact, out of the top 10, we had one of the lowest walkability increases, tied with Boston.

Nationally, we’re still in the top 10 for cities of a certain size, but our neighbors to the north in Vancouver, BC outpace us by about five points, bumping us down to ninth.

Despite limited changes to our pedestrian-friendliness, Seattle is a city that values walkability; an August 2016 Redfin study found that just a one-point increase in Walk Score raised a home’s value by about one percent.

Tacoma didn’t quite make the rankings—they’re about a hundred thousand residents shy of the 300,000 threshold—but for the record, their Walk Score is currently 53, or equivalent to cities in the middle of the top 50.

• These Are the 10 Most Walkable Cities of 2017 [Redfin]
• Seattle's best neighborhoods for renting right this second [CS]
• One Walk Score point increases a Seattle home price by $3,603 [CS]
• Living in Tacoma [WalkScore]