But it's not just Atlanta's downtown that's like this. Look at the Perimeter Center, Lenox/Phipps (two major shopping malls almost across from each other with virtually no way for a pedestrian to access one from the other), or even most of Buckhead, one of the more established areas of Atlanta. Even most of the subdivisions and housing complexes are built without sidewalks. Go to Alpharetta and you see nothing but strip malls. Crossing the street involves getting in your car and negotiating a series of traffic lights, turning lanes, or jug handles.

Atlanta proper is actually very small and the area around it is made up of a series of independent counties. I remember in the 1990s that some of the counties absolutely did not want to work with the city to extend MARTA because it might bring certain "undesirables" from the city to the 'burbs. Now those decisions are coming back to haunt these counties as their residents choke on traffic.

If this isn't addressed explicitly, then I suspect there will be an added element of mystification present in the discussion, and in planning decisions.

I recognize that the political climate in the postwar USA is different from the climate when most of New York was laid out, and as I understand, a lot of Long Island is just as sprawly as metro Atlanta. But it sounds like it still deserves to be the 86th most pedestrian-friendly city in the country.

In any case, Albuquerque in no way deserves to be #17. Prevention's methods are deeply flawed.

New York hasn't had to accommodate that kind of growth so recently and had the 'advantage' of doing so at a time before zoning and when resident opposition to, say, having a 50 story building built next door was much weaker. (Atlantic Yards logrolling notwithstanding)

What's that you say? Most of downtown is newer than that? Why would that be? Because they tore down all the old pedestrian-friendly infrastructure? I see.

Again, I don't have any experience with Atlanta, but every city I visited in North Carolina had tons of streets without sidewalks, or with sidewalks only on one side (the side would sometimes change mid-block). Many of these streets were built recently, but I was disturbed to discover that others had vestiges of the old sidewalks that had been either torn up or left to be overgrown by grass.

Atlanta, Raleigh and most other Southern cities have built hundreds of miles of streets in the past twenty years. They had every opportunity to create a relatively pedestrian-friendly environment like New York, Bronxville or Paris. They could at least have paved sidewalks as in some of the less pedestrian-friendly Western cities like Denver and Albuquerque, but the didn't do that.

The people who built contemporary Atlanta, Houston, Oklahoma City and similar cities could have chosen a pedestrian-friendly design, but their priorities were elsewhere. Why is it unfair to point that out?

Honestly, I don't think that any city that allows right turn on red can count as one of the "best walking cities."

Sadly, the 70,000 people who move to the Atlanta region each year are moving exactly for cheap large houses. It's not until they get there that they see that they're spending hours behind the wheel.

Compare this to a very walkable downtown like Philadelphia. There, the streets are very narrow which makes crossing extremely easy. The sidewalks are full of people, so you don't feel alone or isolated. There's many outdoor cafes that adds to the number of people around. In nicer weather, bars and restaurants will remove the front windows so that as you walk by you can really see in, hear the music, smell the food, see and hear people. I thought that downdown was extremely people-friendly.

The tagline should read:

"Life® Happens here"

I live in Midtown and I'm counting the days until I move back to NYC.

It's cheap and the weather's nice, but the built environment is so awful that it's difficult to enjoy what the city has to offer.

It seems pretty clear to me that the Prevention editors are thinking of walking as a chore that people do to keep in shape, or as a recreational activity, not as a form of transportation. Raleigh certainly has a lot of pretty parks full of walking trails, but you need to spend a lot of time sitting in traffic (in your car, naturally) to get to them; the buses are lame and the commuter rail is ten years behind schedule. The highways are ten-lane deathtraps. Ugh.

Midtown was a series of parking and vacant lots 20 years ago. Since then thousand of units of housing have been built there. Yes the density is making traffic unbearable- but that's the only way that viable transit solutions (this does not include MARTA) will develop.

Sarah- you definitely picked out the bright spots of Atlanta: not surprisingly they were all streetcar neighborhoods. And the bike path you noticed was likely the result of a success protest by the neighborhood to prevent the routing of an expressway in-town. Unfortunately the old homes were demolished but the wacky park and paths were the result.