Over the weekend, the Washington Post ran an interactive feature showing you the walkability of your neighborhood, in average minutes of travel time (by any method) to get things you need. They divided most metro areas into 200-meter hexagons and evaluated three criteria.
My current hexagon comes in at 8.2 minutes. The one I lived in a decade ago, in Lincoln Park, is at 5.2 minutes. The best scores of places I've lived in are Brooklyn (4.8 minutes) and Chicago's Near North Side (4.2 minutes). The specific part of the specific suburb where I grew up is the only bit of the town that shows up as blue, with a score of 13.6 minutes.
I could play with this for hours.
Incidentally, the absolute worst place I ever had the pleasure of living was Mason, Ohio, on a project in late 2010. Mason is so bad, in fact, that the Post interactive map doesn't even attempt to measure it.
