As someone that travels abroad a lot, Boston is an extremely walkable city, and to say otherwise is bullshittery. Almost all tasks can be accomplished on foot. Also, you’re never more than a 5-10 minute walk from a park, and a public square. It’s safe, well lit, and clean.

Even by European (and yes, British Standards), we do a fantastic job. As long as we’re not comparing to London. If we’re comparing to Leeds, Bristol, Birmingham or even Dublin - we’re categorically above.

We have many neighborhoods with walk scores of 99. Cambridge is the most walkable city in the country and ranks as highly as anywhere abroad. We average lower due to neighborhoods like West Roxbury and Roslindale that are more car dependent, but the core city is great.

Unfortunately the MBTA is meh-as-fuck. Even though Paris Metro on-time performance is similar to ours, they still manage to have 2 minute departures during peak hours.

Our Blue Line is pretty normal by European standards in terms of reliability - and the Orange Line actually seems better with all the new trains. Though departure times are less frequent since the Feds got involved and cleaning house.

Hopefully things will get better with Governor Healy. I’m not entirely optimistic, but TBD.

it's a very walkable city, but I don't know if I'd say it's "pedestrian friendly." Those seem to be two separate things that you have linked..

By American standards it’s extremely walkable

Most of the neighborhoods within the core of Boston have a walkability score of 99. That's pretty good. We could make walking safer for pedestrians with better street design and limiting where/when cars and trucks can go. And no one is going to disagree that something has to be done with the MBTA before the infrastructure crumbles to dust.

I'd say its fairly walkable by American city standards. Sure, it's no Paris, London, or Tokyo, but when you compare to the monstrosity such as Houston, Dallas, LA, and Atlanta, its definitely walkable.

If you live in financial district, beacon hill, or back bay, the city is very walkable.

Boston is a terrifically walkable city in many parts--I don't even really agree with the people saying it's significantly worse than major European cities. I have a much easier time doing things like grocery shopping here than I did in London, and there's more green space with a purpose. If you follow the Emerald Necklace, you can actually get from your home to work while not having to cross many street at all. London and Paris have breathtaking parks, but they're generally in contained spaces, rather than snaking through the city.

Boston is walkable due to its size and it is pretty flat. There are also some great places to walk like the Esplanade. The infrastructure for pedestrians sucks (drivers sharing a turn with pedestrians has caused deaths and will cause more). Drivers stopping at lights and crosswalks needs to be enforced as does slowing the speed down on key roads.

Yes. Brookline, Cambridge, Somerville as well. I think with everything being so dense it doesn't take you THAT long to get places.

Having lived in London and worked in Boston.

Boston is very walkable.

Don't get me wrong, the Underground is amazing and even when it closes at night the Night Buses will get you where you need to go, but Boston is much smaller and by extension a bit more manageable by foot.

Boston is one of the most walkable cities in the country

By American standards it’s probably one of the most walkable. By European standards it’s basically to most major European cities as Houston is to the US.

yes, downtown/charlestown/southie/most of the south end is but not rozzie/dorchester/mattapan/west roxbury/hyde park/roxbury

Boston is super walkable. I spend a lot of time in So California where walking is pretty much non-existent and impossible.

It’s strange, Boston is considered so walkable, but as someone from the West Coast I have always felt way less comfortable walking here than Portland, Seattle, or SF. I feel like I am constantly competing with cars as a pedestrian!

It is pretty easy to get anywhere on foot, though.

Boston very walkable, in my opinion. While the streets arent generally straight, the city's not BIG either - and its pretty safe, so theres not generally big industrial dead zones, so it's not that hard to walk from one side of the city to the other. In fact, I have. Dorchester to Cambridge. The only real problem is knowing the streets well enough to know where you're going and once you know that the problems moot.

I've backpacked across Europe and Roadtripped across the US as well, so I've been to LOTS of cities.

Compared to US cities, Boston is supremely walkable (cow path roads aside). The city center was designed people first. So much of the city was laid out before cars or MBTA came about. Even other big US cities struggle to say that. San Francisco, while... 'walkable' has a steep hill problem that makes things problematic for people with disabilities or arent super fit, requiring people to drive to use public transportation. I'm disabled and I've issued with their transportation not stopping at all because theyre full and im left stranded. Its not great.

European cities are walkable only because they were designed and build when walking was the only means of transportation. I've lived in Leeds. Downtown Leeds is just a giant walkable shopping district, residential neighborhoods is GARBAGE.

Absolutely, and anyone who thinks not has not travelled through the US very much. It's not just Boston, greater Boston is also walkable. I have gone on runs from Boston to Reading with a sidewalk the entire way. Many places don't have that.

Walking to go to stores or work, yes it's walkable but of course it'll be better in certain neighborhoods than others.

Yes walkable!! If you can get from one end of the city to the other without a car, that’s a good city.

Source: I lived in Indianapolis for 2 years. You can’t scratch an itch without a car there.

It hay be walkable but I would argue no city with right on red can be called pedestrian friendly.

I would say what the second most walkable behind NYC? It’s unreal how straightforward it can be to walk from like Newton to Seaport.

If you're used to a city like say, Amsterdam or Paris, yes, Boston is much less walkable, especially given the state of the T. Compared to cities like LA or Houston though, it's a pedestrian paradise.

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Yes. There is even a Freedom Trail.

I live in chelsea myself . My apartment has the silver line and train 5 minute walking distant . I only use my car for work most of the time. Visiting New York recently I appreciate Boston so much more

Extremely walkable. I used to work near museum of science and would walk from Fenway all the time. Got there just as quickly as a green line most of the time and the esplanade was really nice to walk on. Love walking in Boston

No, the Boston area is not a walkable city.

The Boston area is a city overrun and dominated by cars and car culture, for the most part.

The gold standard for walkable cities is often Dutch cities in the Netherlands, such as Amsterdam. See Not Just Bikes for more information why. Pedestrian friendliness is key to a walkable city.

While many European cities are much closer to the Dutch standard of urban design and planning, and making a lot of progress. The Boston area's work to reverse the cancer that is car centric urban design is extremely slow, inconsistant, and a patchwork at best. The Boston area has an extremely long ways to go to even reach the "average European city", let alone Dutch cities, in terms of walkability.

The city of Boston, and its inner core suburbs, although built before cars, was signficantly bulldozed for the car in the 1950s - 1970s, relative compared to Amsterdam. Later on, the Big Dig was done in the 2000s to move traffic underground, and also made traffic worse by adding 1 additional lane in each direction and 2 more to get to the airport (adding more lanes only creates more traffic, and maintainance costs and project costs overruns reduced transit funding and capacity).

In Boston, you'll find extremely wide roads, often with highway-size lanes in the middle of the city and slicing through neighborhoods and separating neighborhoods from one another. Sidewalks are often narrow, cramped, and lack tree canopy, and many times curb ramps are extremely poor quality. Pedestrianized streets, traffic calming, and protected bike lanes are few and far between. There are very few pedestrianzed streets or car-light streets. Drivers are aggressive, and you will need to watch out far cars, they won't stop for you. Be careful when taking care of children crossing the street.

Crossing the street in Boston is very dangerous and time consuming compared to Dutch streets. Pedestrians only get the go signal maybe every 3 to 5 minutes. And it takes 30 seconds or so to cross the street since the street is 6 highway-sized lanes wide, or 4 lanes with on street parking. Plus, cars are allowed to park right up to the crosswalk. Meaning you can't see oncoming traffic and oncoming traffic can't see you, because of the parked car blocking visability. And since the road is multiple lanes, you need visibility and driver compliance from multiple lanes of traffic, and the outer lane car can block visibility of pedestrians from the inner lane car. Traffic fatalities in the Boston area is at least double, if not more, than the Netherlands.

While most of the inner core Boston area has sidewalks, once you go north past Malden and Medford, northeast past Revere, northwest past Arlington, west of Waltham, southwest past Brookline, and south of Hyde Park and Quincy. Sidewalks are no longer standard. And you will need a car. Many beaches, mountains, and hiking and skiing trails requires a car. There is no public transit, unlike European countries like the Netherlands or Switzerland. And many jobs, say, in an office park on I-95, means for many jobs, you will need a driver's license to qualify for the job, or you might need a car anyways since transit is unreliable or doesn't exist, and bike lanes are poor quality.

And speaking of bike lanes, bike lanes are often just a painted line on the street, good luck seeing that in the snow-covered roads come winter. So in winter, they are often covered in snow and ice from whatever the plows push the snow aside. And if there's a bike lane, there's no protection from parked cars, meaning dooring is a major problem. And protected bike lanes are not connected with other bike lanes. And even with the few protected bike lanes, you will need to cross an intersection who's primary purpose is to move as many cars as possible, not pedestrian and cyclist safety or comfort.

Many shared use bike paths are often recreational and do not connect residents to jobs, errands, etc, and there's a lot of gaps if it were to be considered part of the "bike network". Some neighborhoods, even in the city, don't have a single bike lane at all, such as Charlestown. Given these "bike lanes", means that you do not see teens or elderly using the bike lanes, often just middle-aged men. And bike parking? Few and far between, you'll need to find whatever fixed object to attach to and worry about it being stolen. And it will need a lot of work to scale up if more were to bike.

Many errands often require walking several minutes through large, bare parking lots to strip malls, due to parking requirements. And these strip malls are far from public transit. And speaking of public transit, buses are slow, infrequent, and get stuck in traffic. Common sense transit features such as bus lanes (on multi-lane streets) and transit signal priority aren't standard. Subway frequencies are a fraction of European, Asian, and even Mexican and South American subway systems.

Zoning laws require massive amounts of parking, setback requirements, restricted to single family only, and large lot sizes, meaning your home and your neighborhood will be car centric and low density, meaning it will be far to walk somewhere (Example: Lexington, Melrose, Dedham, Randolph). Plus, you'll need to shuttle your child to school and sports practices if there's no school buses or public transit is unreliable and non-existant. Although, in the city, children do get free T-passes, so it's doable for them to get around. Note that multi-family zoning was implemented recently, although implementation will take a while.

Even with new developments, and street repaving and reconstruction, traffic calming safety features are not standard. New housing requires parking requirements, except for Cambridge. Raised crosswalks are not standard yet for side streets. Multi-lane streets aren't being reduced to 1 lane for car traffic, with an extra lane redirected to buses or bikes. Cities are yet to ban parking within 20 feet of crosswalks. Traffic lights aren't being relocated to the near side of the intersection from the far side, which if done would improve pedestrian safety crossing the street by discouraging box blocking. Trees are being planted on the sidewalk instead of using a parking spot for tree planting, which makes the sidewalk very narrow. Jaywalking is yet to be decriminalized. The urban street speed limit is 25 MPH, with no plan to update it to 20 MPH to match the 30 KM / H speed limit being adapted by European cities. Right on reds continue to be legal in the Boston area, which is illogical and causes a lot of pedestrian and bike accidents.

Even today, highways are still being widened, and more ways to give more space to cars. For example, the reconstruction of Route 99 will include slip lanes to speed up right turning cars, meaning more crosswalk and more lanes for pedestrians to cross.

As such, progress to undo the cancer that is car culture in Boston, and transform the city into a TRUE walkable city is SLOW and sluggish at best, and "slow" relative to the progress and transformation European cities are making currently.

Cambridge and Somerville are making progress, although it is slow and sluggish (relative to Europe), and many of their multi-model transportation networks are woefully incomplete and have large gaps in the network, as it stands so far. Boston is much slower than Somerville/Cambridge and the multi-model infrastructure only covers a few neighborhoods at best, currently. Most Boston neighborhoods don't have any yet. Maybe by 2050 I could see Cambridge and Somerville approach what the average Europen city is today in terms of walkability, but Boston? Maybe several neighborhoods. Suburbs such as Medford and Malden? Maybe they might become what Boston is today. And transit? It'll probably still be woefully inadequate for demand.

And yes, Boston is much better than most of the US/Canada. Houston, Dallas, Las Vegas are much worse than Boston, and as such, implementation of Dutch quality walkable, multi-modal infrastructure will be a pipe dream for those sunbelt cities. Boston? In some aspects it is trying, in others, not so much; and the sum and product of what Boston has to offer in terms of walkability and multi-modal transport is uncompetitive with that to your average European city.

i love walking around boston. sometimes i walk long distances between train stops instead of getting on the train just because its a nice walk (like from kenmore to government center or aquarium so i can get straight on the blue line. or from gov center to charles/mgh to avoid the green and red lines.) i enjoy it.

obviously theres some bad intersections and whatever but the only other cities i am familiar enough with to compare are providence, new haven ct, san francisco and seattle. i’d say boston is the top of the list and the west coast cities at the bottom for “cities id like to commute via legs”.

It was literally built before cars existed and probably one of the most of not the most walkable city in America. There's a reason why maps of Boston look so fucked up lol, it's because the city was designed with walking in mind. Given the shoehorning of cars into it does throw a wrench into it, but I am consistently able to walk through massive parts of downtown Boston.

I feel like Boston and surrounding areas have great walkability islands connected by driving.

The core parts of Boston, and some of the adjacent towns, definitely yes. MBTA's current troubles aside, there's a good network of public transit to get you within a few blocks of your destination, and probably you can access the system within a similarly short distance.

Some of the more outlaying parts ... maybe yes?

Overall, it's got to be one of the more walkable cities in the U.S.

...

Compared to most of Europe it's pretty shit, though.

Once you get into the city its extremely walkable.

unpopular opinion: having a car in this city makes it so much more accessible than public transit and walkability and even alternative transport options like bike. lived here all my life and have done all those, car really makes everything so small. if you actually know your way around, where to park even in the middle of city, and know when and where you cant go during rush hour makes this city so much more accessible than just walking or taking transit. of course factors in affordability, and thats not entirely possible for most people and im grateful to have a situation where i can park for free on my street etc…but actually having a car is gold here. can get around fast, and immediately get out to other states to get outta town

Very walkable. For the US I would put it in the top 3 major cities with NY and DC

Compared to other places I’ve lived, Boston is extremely walkable. Try running errands on foot elsewhere and you’ll see how car dependent much of the U.S. is. I had to drive for one year prior to moving to Boston because it was the only way to guarantee that I would make it to work on time.

Absolutely

More people (as a percentage) walk to work in Boston than any other large city in the country.

My personal walkability rank based on living in these places for more than 6 months

London

Boston

DC

Pittsburgh

Chicago

Columbus

Nashville

Riyadh

I live in Coolidge corner and walk 2.1 miles to work each day.

I sold my car, and I own multiple thicknesses of Canada goose jackets and long underwear to manage walking through 90% of the winter.

I love it, and I’m about to quit my job/career to find another walkable job. because my company is selling the building to move out of the city.

Yes, very much so. I love walking around Boston.

Considerations aside, objectively it is.

Yes.

Well since I've heard people refer to Boston as the walking city. I would say it's walkable.

Easily one of the most walkable largest cities in the US

100% walkable. Used to take public transportation for the morning commute to the north end and then walk the ~2ish hours all the way back to the outer end of Brighton.

I'd say it's very walkable, and I've spent a lot of time in Europe.

It’s very walkable for the US (and I actually think the pedestrian infrastructure is OK, too). I’ve never lived in Europe, but thinking of cities I’ve visited, I’d say Boston is maybe below-average, but not by that much. It just doesn’t have a pedestrianized zone in or near the center the way a lot of European cities do.

The MBTA is a mess, though.

Absolutely!

Buy a Boston travel guide and look at the included street level maps. It’s basically Downtown Boston, ranging from the southern part of Charlestown and the northern part of the south end in the east, and the Fenway area in the west. They will also usually have a breakout map for Harvard Square and maybe MIT.

This is basically the non-resident‘s version of Boston, and there are essentially no two points on that map that are more than an hour walk from one another. You don’t even need mass transit, most stuff will be less than a 20 minute walk away by foot.

If you want to go to Costco, some fancy restaurant in Newton, or go pyo apple picking, then walking isn’t very realistic.

It might not always be walk-friendly, but due to the distances involved, the core is walk-able.

It is walkable, but it also has a disproportionate number of extremely stupid intersections/street designs that make it unnecessarily dangerous for pedestrians.

Very! It’s America’s Walking City™️.

Absolutely. When I can walk from South Station to Porter Square without needing any kinds of breaks, I'd safely assume the city is pretty darn walkable.

Now if we consider going up or down the staircase at the T station there, that's a different story.

Once you get to the longwood medical area anything east of there is very walkable. East Boston and anything west of the longwood area usually requires people to own a car for one reason or another

I’ve always considered Boston a walkable city, but after witnessing several near misses of pedestrians being hit by cars I’m re-thinking the walk ability.

Depends where you live. I live in Quincy far from anything useful so not really

By American standards, yes. By European standards, not at all.

Yes. Walking around downtown is great. Train into downtown makes it convenient.

Getting into the city from the suburbs or even somewhere like Winter Hill, Somerville on the other hand... cut across 4 lane road, 6 land intersection, hop the guardrail, cross the offramp, hop another guardrail, trudge through the snow in the parking lot and past the plow dumping grounds, mbta. After midnight - pay $80 for an Uber ya sucker. Want food? Walk 1.5 miles to market basket or across a bunch of highways to wegmans / Whole Foods.

So yeah. Great if your somewhere interconnected. Great food and jobs and trains with similar places in walking distance. Otherwise your dependent on car / e-bike (great until it snows).

The metro region is dense enough that everywhere is close but IMO that alone doesn’t make it walkable. It will / should become more transit oriented.

Driving in the city off rush hour is a lot of fun imo. Relaxed policing, good driver communication, good signage, European layout / squares, beautiful roads along rivers, tunnels, bridges, etc. Parking always blows and the traffic can get intense real fast.

Compared to the rest of the country it’s great. But vs NYC ... eh. Idk is that even a fair comparison?

It's walkable but only a few areas are pedestrian friendly. The places that people think of as traditionally "Boston" (Fenway, Back Bay, South End, Chinatown, DTX etc) are pedestrian friendly. The rest of it is not and there's a lot of land and people in those areas. How familiar are you with the rest of Boston? Walk past Mass Ave. sometime into Roxbury or head out to Roslindale or Mattapan and see how pedestrian friendly it is for yourself...

A lot of the time the drivers are fine, but the pedestrians don't know how to lawfully walk.

Some parts are. Most parts aren't. Anyone who says the city is walkable is coming from bumfuck nowhere and trying to aggrandize the city. I'm both from the city and I travel a lot. Boston has more in common with European suburbs than the cities themselves, but plenty of parts are cut off.

Keep in mind that some people say "walkable" includes transit, while others don't. I can see either point. Regardless, those who have cars are at a huge advantage. Only when it's mainly a disadvantage for the city does "walkable" start to shift in balance.

It’s walkable in the CBD/downtown area. It’s drivable all over.