Evergrey

good luck, MayDay!

I refuse to participate in an election that does not include grasscat as an option.

It's important to make the distinction that this trend is referring to the 75-and over population... these are people that are very old, have been retired for many years and are often in poor health No freshly retired person moves to Ohio from the South. We will always see a negative migration rate for that demographic. This trend is basically a boomerang phenomenon. Ohioan retires in his/her early/mid 60s.. moves to Clearwater... gets bored and realizes he/she never actually goes to the beach... turns 80... gets sick... misses family... moves back to Barberton.

Wow, looks like Toledo has a lot of basketball talent.

Where does Athens get its money? It's a tiny municipality dominated by a large tax-exempt university and largely populated by college students who generate little to no income. It's no suprise that Athens cannot pay for its infrastructure.

nice Perth Amboy shot! that sauerbraten looks köstlich!

wonderful human-scaled environments... i've never tried sri lankan cuisine :(

looks like fun!

very unique area

indeed... muy excelente

I too am a sucker for the old, quaint stuff... NYC is lucky to have this hanging around.

what was Kevin Pollak doing in Cleveland?

Hooray for intra-regional cannibalism and regional governance fragmentation!

I agree there are a lot of things that go into weak rates of public transit usage. I believe "walkable environments" is one factor that strongly correlates with transit usage. Transit tends to be more developed in sophisticated in areas with large walkable environments... which results in greater rates of usage. I will admit, that according to the statistics... Cincy seems to be a bit of an outlier... as it has a pretty decent percentage of walking commuters... yet a woeful percentage of transit commuters... I would assume the complete lack of light rail would have something to do with that... which represents a permenant investment in transit infrastructure and also tends to have a much more positive perception than the bus.

Not exactly sure what you're trying to get at with that rambling 2nd half of your post. Good points about street widths and setbacks. But I disagree about Cincinnati getting screwed. Most major cities have large swaths that are uninhabited due to topography, industry, golf courses, parks or LuLu's. We can nitpick about about the inherent fallacy of comparing anything to anything all day.

and that's 3.27% of the whole city, where 2/3 of it is suburban. a problem with these lists is it lists the whole city, so columbus gets it bad even though parts of it are as walkable as cambridge or ann arbor or whatever And yet... Columbus isn't a Cambridge of an Ann Arbor. It's a major city... the student ghetto is only a small part of it... while it's the dominant part of those other classic college towns. And we all know municipal boundaries vary wildly across the US... but when it comes to cities over 250k... this is the best way to compare them. I'm sure if you pared Columbus down to the 200,000 people that inhabit the original 50 sq. miles or whatever... it would push Columbus to around 5 or 6 percent... perhaps you could find data for all the census tracts that make up the old city. But we could nitpick for a lot of cities.

I disagree about the "number of people walking to work" being a "poor proxy" for "walkability". Streetscape design is secondary to the "urban structure" of a city. Charlotte can have hundreds of miles of manicured greenways and asphalt walking strips... but it still doesn't make "walking as transportation" a viable option in that city... because of the way the urban structure is designed there... largely a result of being developed almost completely in the automobile era. Luckily, our northern cities were built in the walking era... and while we've done a lot to superimpose automobile structure on our cities and destroy much of our walkability... at least we still have some vestiges of that era that the Sunbelt cities still have not developed. You need appropriate urban structure... good examples in the US include Boston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Washington, San Francisco... residential, commercial and jobs need to be close together (incl. mixed-use) with functioning linkages... and strong vibrant neighborhoods that offer the amenities of daily life... Pedestrian-oriented streetscape design is an element of structural walkability... but streetscapes alone can't make a place functionally walkable. walkability also goes hand in hand with transit... since transit is unable to drop people off in front of every building... it can only function effectively in areas with density and walkability... and that can be within a major urban area or serving clusters. Usually cities that have high percentages of people walking to work... also have high percentages of people taking public transit to work. Ohio cities, for example, score relatively poorly in people walking to work... and probably related to this... have relatively low rates of transit usage. http://www.bikesatwork.com/carfree/carfree-census-database.html

http://www.expansionmanagement.com/smo/newsviewer/default.asp?cmd=articledetail&articleid=18375&st=3 PDF LIST: http://www.expansionmanagement.com/smo/DocReserve/DocReserve_Content/1-List%20of%2050%20Hottest%20Cities(2).pdf 2007 AMERICA’S 50 HOTTEST CITIES: Perception Is a Critical Factor in Attracting Expanding Companies Click on "Related Link" to read PRESS RELEASE Our annual poll of 80 prominent corporate site location experts give us their list of the best places to expand or relocate a business. [ 2/18/2007 ] By: Ken Krizner, Managing Editor Companies that are contemplating an expansion or relocation of their manufacturing facility, headquarters or back office operations have a certain set of criteria they use to make the most informed decision possible... CLICK HERE TO SEE THE LIST http://www.expansionmanagement.com/smo/DocReserve/DocReserve_Content/1-List%20of%2050%20Hottest%20Cities(2).pdf

of course Raleigh is at the top

thank you, seicar

It seems like (I dont know for sure) that the real estate bubbles are bursting in those top cities and people are looking elsewhere because of the markup on the higher end urban housing. Not the answer I was looking for. I was looking for something more along the lines of "we're a bunch of lazy happy-motoring idiots who would prefer living in a dystopian nowhere-land with easy access to fry-pits and drive-thru credit unions than functional, vibrant urban environments".... besides... some top cities like Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and Newark (despite its proximity to NYC) have seen little or no "real estate bubble"... and the most over-valued state... California... ranks pretty poorly in this statistic (San Fran excluded)

Kingfish... I was with that list until I got to Charlotte... ranking 64th out of 67 cities with populations over 250,000 with 1.57% walking to work doesn't scream "walking city" to me... maybe they're making strides... maybe they have some cute greenways... but Charlotte's got a loooooong way to go... I swear it's impossible for Charlotte to get any negative press! ;)

ok... let's weed out the college towns... I'm bolding Ohio cities and cities of regional interest Pedestrian Commuter % for cities over 250,000 (data from http://www.bikesatwork.com) 1. Boston, MA 13.36% 2. Washington, DC 12.27% 3. New York City, NY 10.72% 4. Pittsburgh, PA 10.02% 5. San Francisco, CA 9.82% 6. Philadelphia, PA 9.22% 7. Newark, NJ 8.03% 8. Seattle, WA 7.72% 9. Baltimore, MD 7.28% 10. Minneapolis, MN 6.85% 11. Honolulu, HI 6.8% 12. Chicago, IL 5.8% 13. Cincinnati, OH 5.61% 14. St. Paul, MN 5.58% 15. Portland, OR 5.47% 16. Buffalo, NY 5.43% 17. New Orleans, LA 5.35% 18. Milwaukee, WI 4.79% 19. Denver, CO 4.51% 20. Louisville, KY 4.17% 21. Lexington, KY 4.13% 22. St. Louis, MO 4.11% 23. Cleveland, OH 4.1% 24. Oakland, CA 3.89% 25. San Diego, CA 3.8% 26. Miami, FL 3.75% 27. Los Angeles, CA 3.72% 28. Atlanta, GA 3.64% 29. Tucson, AZ 3.54% 30. Columbus, OH 3.27% 31. Riverside, CA 3.1% 32. Raleigh, NC 2.99% 33. Detroit, MI 2.86% 34. Sacramento, CA 2.85% 35. Albuquerque, NM 2.79% 36. Anchorage, AK 2.76% 37. Austin, TX 2.64% 38. Long Beach, CA 2.61% 39. Colorado Springs, CO 2.55% 40. Nashville, TN 2.45% 41. Omaha, NE 2.43% 42. Tampa, FL 2.41% 43. Toledo, OH 2.36% 44. Houston, TX 2.36% 45. Kansas City, MO 2.33% 46. Anaheim, CA 2.32% 47. Tulsa, OK 2.31% 48. Santa Ana, CA 2.27% 49. Phoenix, AZ 2.24% 50. San Antonio, TX 2.22% 51. Las Vegas, NV 2.21% 52. Mesa, AZ 2.14% 53. Fresno, CA 2.12% 54. Indianapolis, IN 2.05% 55. Virginia Beach, VA 2.02% 56. Dallas, TX 2.01% 57. El Paso, TX 2% 58. Memphis, TN 1.96% 59. Corpus Christi, TX 1.85% 60. Jacksonville, FL 1.82% 61. Fort Worth, TX 1.75% 62. Arlington, TX 1.65% 63. Oklahoma City, OK 1.63% 64. Charlotte, NC 1.57% 65. San Jose, CA 1.48% 66. Wichita, KS 1.46% 67. Aurora, CO 1.44% ...interesting that most of the cities at the top of this list are losing population while most of the cities at the bottom are amongst the fastest growing cities in the US... what does that say about where we're heading as a country?

Not in this case. If you click on the link, you'll see that their info is sourced to the Census and a website for a Car-Free Organization (who did some pretty detailed commuting lists). You can look up all these numbers on the Census website.

Syracuse (Syracuse University) and Irvine (UC-Irvine) are both college towns... though a bit bigger than your usual college town (150k and 200k) especially considering their respective universities aren't mega-universities like OSU... they each have about 18,000 students. So kudos to them!