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.