Best Cities In The Best States

In my last post I ranked the states by debt to gross state product ratio and homicide rate. Here I will use two filters, and then four criteria to rank the best cities to live in.
First, I calculated the percent parkland of the top 13 states from my previous list. I'm using a very broad definition of parkland here. I used the sum of state park properties and National Park Service Properties. This included the acreage of parks, recreation areas, natural areas, historical areas, environmental education areas, scientific areas, forests, fish and wildlife areas, and miscellaneous areas from the Statistical Report of State Park Operations. I added this to the acreage of national historical reserves, historical sites, historical parks, recreation areas, and parks. I had to use some approximation for the second category because it was difficult to find breakdowns of acreage for national parks that span multiple states. Trails were ignored. I doubt that fixing approximation errors would lead to any change in the overall rankings, however.

State	Parkland %
Massachusetts	5.93
Washington	4.32
New Hampshire	3.90
Utah	3.20
Idaho	2.40
Wyoming	2.02
Vermont	1.14
Minnesota	1.08
South Dakota	0.81
Maine	0.65
Wisconsin	0.62
Nebraska	0.38
Iowa	0.20

I decided to focus on just the eight states with more than 1% parkland. I then moved on to ranking the cities. The four criteria for cities were Transit Score (as published on www.walkscore.com), weather, natural disaster risk, and air pollution. Generally, a Transit Score is only published if a city has a 2010 population greater than 200,000. This limited my analysis to just six cities in the eight states I considered: Salt Lake City, Minneapolis, Saint Paul, Boston, Seattle, and Spokane. I excluded Salt Lake City and Seattle because they appear on the American Lung Association's list of most polluted cities. I used a natural disaster map published by The New York Times to assign each city a relative risk (1 being the lowest risk and 5 being the greatest). The final formula to rank the cities was Transit Score/(natural disaster risk(temperature variance + mean number of rain/snow days per year)). Temperature variance is the sum of the differences of the July mean high and the January mean low from 70 degrees F. The final rankings and there scores:

Rank	State	Score
1	Spokane	0.211
2	Minneapolis	0.111
3	Boston	0.100
4	Saint Paul	0.086

Although Spokane is the winner by a large margin, further investigation led me to conclude that I will not be moving there for now. Spokane has no public universities. I think the presence of a large university (especially public universities) can be important for the cultural and intellectual health of a city. For now, I will be staying in Minneapolis, unless the weather gets even worse, in which case I might be moving to Boston.