Columbus near bottom of walkability survey (from Business First)

Friday, December 7, 2007
Columbus near bottom of walkability survey
Business First of Columbus

Columbus residents looking to catch some air might want to get behind the wheel instead, a new survey indicates.

A new field survey from the Washington, D.C.-based Brookings Institution placed Columbus 19th out of the nation’s 30 largest metropolitan areas based on its walkable urban areas per capita. The survey, which excluded inherently walkable areas such as medical and college campuses and large corporate headquarters, considered the Short North the only “regional-serving” walkable urban space for the area’s 1.73 million residents.

“Regional-serving” means an area of the city or a suburb that is not just residential, but also has jobs and retail or cultural institutions that bring in people who don’t live there.

Columbus still fared better than the Cincinnati and Cleveland areas, which ranked 28th and 29th in the survey. The institute considered Cincinnati’s Hyde Park neighborhood and Cleveland’s University Circle the only walkable spaces in the two cities, which have a combined population exceeding 4.2 million.

The survey, led by Christopher B. Leinberger, a real estate developer and visiting fellow with the institution who has lived in all 30 areas, found that cities with the best per-capita volumes of walkable space often correlated with in-place rail transit systems. And despite a recent trend toward downtown revitalization, Columbus a prime example, the survey found that a roughly equal amount of walkable spaces were found in downtown-adjacent and suburban areas.

The Brookings survey said the Washington, D.C., area could be the national standard for walkable space with one area for every 264,520 people. The Boston area came in second for the ranking with 11 walkable areas, or one for every 405,020 people. A cluster of metropolitan areas comprising the New York, New Jersey and Stamford, Conn., areas ranked 10th in the survey but had the highest number of walkable areas in the nation at 21.

The top 10 most walkable metro areas had about two-thirds of the 157 walkable areas found in all 30 cities.