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Recently, we broke the good news that Los Angeles is actually quite walkable, despite the haters hatin'. Ranked 13th out of 50 by WalkScore, a website that measures the walkability of certain areas, L.A. is not as pedestrian-friendly as no-one-drives-here New York, but it's more conducive to foot traffic than San Diego, Denver, and even Austin.
In addition to ranking major U.S. cities, though, the site also took a look at smaller locales by state, and found that West Hollywood is the most walkable city in California. Woot!
According to the website, cities are ranked through a carefully crafted equation:
"Walk Score measures how easy it is to live a car-lite lifestyle—not how pretty the area is for walking....The Walk Score algorithm awards points based on the distance to amenities in each category. Amenities within .25 miles receive maximum points and no points are awarded for amenities further than one mile."
West Hollywood wasn't the only city in L.A. county to make the list. Here's how some of our other cities fared in comparison to the rest of the state:
So! Looks like L.A. is pretty walkable after all. I don't know whether this means we should all quit our bitching and get out of our cars, or everyone who doesn't live here should STFU about how you can't walk in L.A. Perhaps some combination of both is in order.
