Dan Burden, after helping hundreds of communities make

Dan Burden, after helping hundreds of communities make their streets and public spaces comfortable for pedestrians, has been trying recently to help the editors of Prevention magazine understand what makes a place genuinely good for walking. Each year since 2003, Prevention, in partnership with the American Podiatric Medical Association, has selected what it claims are the best cities for walking. Last year Burden was astounded to see that the magazine’s top 10 included Las Vegas ( “the least livable and walkable in America,” in his view); Anchorage, Alaska (a city which he says “breaks its connectivity as it sprawls itself to death”); Virginia Beach, Virginia; and Raleigh, North Carolina; along with truly pedestrian-oriented cities such as Portland, Oregon, and Madison, Wisconsin. Prevention’s lists have been a strange combination of intelligence and silliness. Its rankings were based in part on such dubious-to-ridiculous criteria as the percentage of the population that walks for exercise; the percentage that owns a dog; the number of days of precipitation; and the percentage of people buying athletic shoes. Burden, senior urban designer at Glatting Jackson in Orlando, Florida, pointed out to the editors that better indicators would be the percentage of children who walk to school; the ease of access to parks; density; mix of uses; and street connectivity, among others. When Prevention’s 2007 list is published in April, we should know whether the magazine has begun to take walking and community design seriously.