Quantifying the walkability of communities

I've got a birthday vacation to take in the coming months, and being someone who prefers walkable cosmopolitan areas, I found this cool site to be an invaluable resource for my planning. You can check out how your neighbourhood ranks in its walkability, and you can choose, as I did, your next holiday city from the list of walker's paradises in the U.S. Not surprisingly, New York neighbourhoods dominate the top ten.

My own neighbourhood gets a respectable score of 77 on the index. I have no argument with that, but one factor that the ranking system doesn't account for is climate. My city, for example, tends to get a lot of snow in the winter. And, as a very experienced pedestrian, I would say that although snow on its own is usually quite manageable, slippery sidewalks resulting from compressed snow and ice can make an area completely unwalkable. Where I live, sidewalk snow and ice removal is sporadic and rarely timely. Roads and vehicles are very much the priority and proponents of car culture are still the dominant voices in my community.

Of course, I'm hoping that will change. With statistics beginning to emerge about all of the peripheral problems related to driving, it would be nice to see more people getting out of their vehicles and onto the bike paths or walkways. Until then, my travel destinations will be cities that allow me to experience them with all of my senses, in the open air, unhindered, moving through their spaces wholly on my own volition.