Walk Score has ranked 2,508 neighborhoods in the largest 40 U.S. cities to help people to find a walkable place to live. Walk score is a  web-based service that helps you to find walkable places to live by calculating a Walk Score for any address. They score the walkability of an address on a scale of 1 to 100 based on access to amenities, groceries, transportation display it graphically (the more green, the more walkable, red being the least).

To get their ranking they have a special methodology. They sampled the Walk Score of 1,123,855 locations in the largest 40 U.S. cities to create walkability heat maps and rank 2,508 neighborhoods. Data came from:

• Walk Score algorithm
• City boundaries (they used the U.S. Census 2000 "Incorporated Places"
• Neighborhood lists (neighboorhods with more than 500 people; they used Zillow’s list of neighborhoods to define the neighborhoods in each city and their shapes; if a neighborhood intersects a city boundary, they included it in the rankings)
• Population data (to weight Walk Scores by population density, they use the U.S. Census 2000 SF1 Census Block Demographics)

Read more details about the methodology on their website.

These are the results of the Walk Score rankings:

1. San Francisco, CA
2. New York, NY 
3. Boston, MA
4. Chicago, IL
5. Philadelphia, PA
6. Seattle, WA
7. Washington DC
8. Long Beach, CA
9. Los Angeles, CA
10. Portland, OR

Have a look on the walkability ‘heat maps’ for all of them here.

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