How to Walk More, Drive Less in Your 'Hood

Using less gas is on everyone's minds these days -- and one way to do it is to ditch your car, or to at least go from being a multi-car to a single-car family.

Sprawling suburbs and exurbs don't make this very easy. Infill communities, which develop underutilized urban space, gentrified city neighborhoods and contrived suburban town centers, which had already been on the ascendancy in cities from Houston to Phoenix to Denver, are attracting new interest from people who want to be less dependent on their cars.

Search engines and online databases available are making it easier to find dense, mixed-use communities, live in them, and get away from them when you need to, while decreasing your dependence on your automobile.

A Web site called Walk Score rates how easy it is to get by on foot in 2,508 neighborhoods in the country's 40 biggest cities. 

It's not a perfect formula. It considers population density, proximity to schools, jobs, parks, a town center and shops and services. It doesn't consider things like access to public transit, crime, topography (how hilly a city is), climate or the degree of pedestrian-friendly design.

It has a list of 138 neighborhoods it deems paradisiacal for walkers.

Nine of the top 10 are in New York or San Francisco. But Old Westport in Kansas City slips in right at number 10. Neighborhoods in Portland, Ore. (Pearl District), Washington, D.C. (Dupont Circle), Seattle (Pioneer Square), Philadelphia (City Center East) and Chicago (the Loop) round out the top 25.