[cnntth]

Boston is /very/ walkable, the whole city can be walked end to end in a few hours and Somerville is one of the densest neighborhoods in the U.S.

I'll also say D.C. (and to some extent Northern Virginia and select parts of Maryland) makes car ownership optional, the transit system does a good job of covering a lot of neighborhoods.

I've been to a few college towns that also, by necessity, are dense and are walkable or at least bikeable oasis in otherwise rural areas.

[ghaff]

The thing with college towns is that you tend to have the campus and, if it's in a rural area, generally a few streets of associated town. Technically walkable but, once you're not a student any longer, the campus is less interesting/useful and there probably isn't a whole lot in the ten or so blocks of the town that you can walk to. You can doubtless survive but the options are probably limited without a car (and most of your non-student friends in the area probably have one).

[thethethethe]

Thanks for the info, I added an edit to my comment

[ghaff]

BTW, Boston did pretty much bulldoze the center of the city (the West End) for a freeway but spent some $10 billion (much of it federal money) to rectify the problem with the Big Dig. It was walkable before the freeway was dismantled but less so in Boston proper. (As with other US cities, it was also less safe in general a few decades ago.)