Why Don't Conservative Cities Walk?
from Slate:
Why Don't Conservative Cities Walk?
By Will Oremus | Posted Tuesday, April 17, 2012, at 12:44 PM ET
[font size="1"]Boston has the highest share of walk-to-work commuters of any American city.
Wikimedia Commons Photo[/font]
Reading Tom Vanderbilt’s series on the crisis in American walking, I noticed something about the cities with the highest “walk scores.” They’re all liberal. New York, San Francisco, and Boston, the top three major cities on Walkscore.com, are three of the most liberal cities in the country. In fact, the top 19 are all in states that voted for Obama in 2008. The lowest-scoring major cities, by comparison, tilt conservative: Three of the bottom four—Jacksonville, Oklahoma City, and Fort Worth—went for McCain. What explains the correlation? Don’t conservatives like to walk?
You might think it’s a simple matter of size: Big cities lean liberal and also tend to be more walkable. That’s generally true, but it doesn’t fully explain the phenomenon. Houston, Phoenix, and Dallas are among the nation’s ten largest cities, but they’re also among the country’s more conservative big cities, and none cracks the top 20 in walkability. All three trail smaller liberal cities such as Portland, Denver, and Long Beach. And if you expand the data beyond the 50 largest cities, the conservative/liberal polarity only grows. Small liberal cities such as Cambridge, Mass., Berkeley, Ca., and Paterson, N.J. make the top 10, while conservative cities of similar size such as Palm Bay, Fl. and Clarksville, Ten. rank at the bottom.
Substituting density for size gets us closer: Houston, Phoenix, and Dallas are notorious for sprawl, while New York, San Francisco, and Boston are tightly packed, partly because they are older cities whose downtown cores developed in the pre-car era. As they grew, their borders were constrained by those of the smaller cities and towns that surrounded them. That’s not the case with many Southern and Western cities. Jacksonville and Oklahoma City, for instance, are vast in terms of land area, encompassing suburban and even semi-rural neighborhoods as well as urban ones.
That still leaves the question of why urban density should go hand-in-hand with liberal politics, however. I see four possible categories of explanations. 1) Liberals build denser, more walkable cities (e.g., Portlanders supporting public transit and policies that limit sprawl). 2) Liberals are drawn to cities that are already dense and walkable (think college grads migrating to Minneapolis rather than San Antonio, or young families settling down in Lowell, Mass., with a walk score of 64.1, rather than Fort Wayne, Ind., with a walk score of 39. 3) Walkable cities make people more liberal (by forcing them to get along with diverse neighbors and to rely on highly visible city services such as parks and subways). 4) The same factors that make cities dense and walkable also make them liberal. ...................(more)
The complete piece is at: http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/04/17/_.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
so that they don't have to "get along with diverse neighbors". 
when the heat index is 114 and it's humid as hell, nobody wants to walk anywhere.
Out here in the western burbs, all of the subdivisions have parks and walking trails, so there is that walkability for exercise, bike riding and jogging (if you get up before the heat). Houston is also a pretty liberal city. Mayors tend to be liberal, and it currently has a gay mayor. Don't lump Houston with Dallas and Phoenix! 
The tightly packed cities are also older, which may contribute--they were originally built for horse traffic.
I find point 3 above to be suspect. Walking around in cramped urban areas and using crowded subways doesn't make one want to get along with one's fellow citizens. Spend a couple of years riding the tube in London and you'll see what I mean.
It's that damned tree-hugging environmentalism. It kills jobs.
