The Most Walkable Chicago Suburbs, and the One That Earns It

If a real-estate listing calls a suburb “walkable,” the next question should be: from which house?

Oak Park can make a reasonable case for the whole town. La Grange, Hinsdale, Downers Grove and Elmhurst have downtowns where you can get off Metra, walk to dinner, pick up coffee and generally avoid returning to your car every nine minutes.

Arlington Heights manages to be both quite walkable and not especially walkable, depending on which few blocks you're standing in.

And Bensenville is a useful warning about trusting a number on a real-estate website.

There is no honest ranking from one through seven here. The available data isn't precise enough to put several of these suburbs in order, and town averages aren't particularly good at describing what happens around their downtowns anyway.

There is, however, one clear winner if you want to live with as little car dependence as possible: Oak Park.

For the more suburban version of this life, the trick is remarkably consistent. Look for the Metra station, then look at what surrounds it.

We checked Census commuting and car-ownership data from 2020–2024, the EPA's National Walkability Index and the location of each town's train station. The Census numbers include margins of error because apparently statistics refuse to participate in a clean seven-town ranking just because the internet would prefer one.

On this page: What walkable means here · Oak Park · The four good downtowns · Arlington Heights · Bensenville · Metra · Winter · FAQ

First, decide what you mean by walkable

There are two different questions hiding inside the word.

One is whether a suburb has a walkable downtown. Can you take the train there, walk to restaurants and shops, get coffee, go to the library and spend a few hours without needing a car?

Several Chicago suburbs do that well.

The harder question is whether you can live there without depending on a car for most of your life.

That's a much shorter list.

This distinction gets lost when people use Walk Score as the answer.

Walk Score is owned by Redfin and uses a proprietary system to score what's near an address. Its methodology is described publicly, but the exact algorithm and amenity weights aren't.

More importantly, it doesn't measure whether residents walk.

The Census does.

It asks people how they get to work and whether their household has a vehicle. Those aren't perfect measures of walkability either. Someone who works from home and walks to the grocery store every afternoon will disappear from the commuting statistic.

Still, if one source says an area looks walkable and another tells us whether residents are living without cars, I'd like to see both.

And they do not always agree.

Oak Park is the clear outlier

Oak Park is the only place in this group where every measure points in the same direction.

4.3% ±1.2 percentage points of residents walk to work.

13.1% ±1.6 take public transit.

And 11.7% ±1.6 of households have no vehicle at all.

That last number is particularly useful. It's roughly one out of every nine households living without a car.

The next highest town in this group is closer to one in 13.

Oak Park also scores well on the EPA's National Walkability Index. Our population-weighted calculation comes to 15.56 across 53 block groups, with individual areas ranging from 11.33 to 19.67 on the EPA's 1-to-20 scale.

That 15.56 is our calculation, not an official EPA score for Oak Park. The agency publishes its index for smaller block groups rather than entire towns.

Then there is transit.

Oak Park has Metra's UP-West Line and CTA's Green and Blue lines. No other suburb in this comparison has CTA rail.

So if the question is, “Where can I move to the suburbs and have a plausible shot at not owning a car?”, Oak Park is the strongest answer here.

It is also the least traditionally suburban option in the group, which may be precisely why it works.

We have a separate Evanston versus Oak Park guide if Oak Park is already on your shortlist, and our suburbs for young professionals guide gets further into the rental and late-night-train side of living without a car.

Four downtowns without a fake ranking

Then we get to La Grange, Hinsdale, Downers Grove and Elmhurst.

I'd happily send someone looking for a walkable suburban downtown to any of them.

I would not tell you that the Census proves one is No. 2 and another is No. 5.

Here's why.

Those walking estimates overlap once you include their margins of error.

Downers Grove's 2.3% and La Grange's 1.7% look rankable if you ignore the ± numbers sitting beside them. We aren't going to do that. They were invited too.

What all four have is more tangible: a commercial downtown built around a train station.

La Grange

The BNSF station sits at La Grange Road and Burlington Avenue, right in the downtown.

Restaurants, shops and other daily destinations cluster around it, and the surrounding street grid makes the downtown easy to use on foot.

The Census estimates 1.7% ±0.9 of workers walk to work. That does not make La Grange less useful for someone who wants to walk to dinner. It means we don't have evidence to declare it more walkable townwide than Hinsdale, Elmhurst or Downers Grove.

One Walk Score number that has circulated for La Grange is even less useful: 95.

Walk Score does not publish a townwide La Grange score. That figure is for an individual address near the station.

A highly walkable point in downtown La Grange tells you downtown La Grange is highly walkable. You probably did not need an algorithm for that.

Hinsdale

Hinsdale's Metra station also sits directly in its downtown, which has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 2006.

The interesting number here is car ownership.

Only 2.3% ±1.0 of Hinsdale households have no vehicle.

That's roughly one car-free household out of every 43.

So you can have an attractive downtown where walking is easy and a population that overwhelmingly owns cars. There is no contradiction. People can walk to dinner on Friday and drive to Costco on Saturday. Humans contain multitudes and apparently several SUVs.

For someone considering a house here, I'd care much more about how far that particular house is from the village center than where Hinsdale lands on somebody's suburban walkability list.

Downers Grove

Downers Grove has two BNSF stations, but they're not interchangeable.

The Main Street station is the one embedded in downtown and the one that gets the useful express service.

If you're choosing Downers Grove because you want to walk to the train and downtown businesses, distance from Main Street station belongs in the home search.

The Census walking estimate is 2.3% ±0.9. Again, that's statistically indistinguishable from the other three towns in this group.

Our western suburbs guide compares these towns from the commute side, which becomes more useful once you've decided the downtown itself works for you.

Elmhurst

Elmhurst's UP-West station sits just off York Street in the middle of a substantial commercial district.

The DuPage visitors bureau puts the downtown at more than 50 restaurants and 40-plus shops. City Centre itself publishes no count, which is worth knowing before you repeat the figure as the district's own.

You may also see a figure claiming there are more than 250 businesses downtown. Be careful with that one. City Centre is a membership organization, and its 250-to-300 figure refers to merchant members rather than a literal count of storefronts in the district.

Elmhurst's Census walking estimate is 2.1% ±0.5.

That's a good example of why I'd use the downtown rather than the village as the unit when shopping for a home. The center works on foot. An Elmhurst address farther away may give you an entirely different daily routine.

Arlington Heights depends entirely on the address

Arlington Heights is my favorite example of why these lists go wrong.

Its townwide Census number is unimpressive: 1.0% ±0.3 walk to work.

Our population-weighted calculation from the EPA data is 10.81.

You could look at those numbers and conclude that Arlington Heights isn't especially walkable.

Then you could get off Metra downtown.

The station sits in a dense commercial core with restaurants, apartments and entertainment around it. During Arlington Alfresco, portions of Vail Avenue, Campbell Street and the side streets around them close to traffic. In 2026, that runs from May 1 through September 28.

The EPA block-group data helps explain what is happening.

Scores inside Arlington Heights range from 5.83 to 18.67.

That's an enormous spread within one village.

The downtown is dense and walkable. Large parts of the rest of Arlington Heights are built around driving.

If you tell a real-estate agent you want “walkable Arlington Heights,” the adjective needs to survive all the way to the street address.

A house close enough to downtown that you can walk to Metra and restaurants offers something very different from a house several miles away, despite both listings saying Arlington Heights at the top.

If you're curious what there is to walk to, Arlington Heights also appears in our suburban rooftop guide and dog-friendly restaurant guide.

Arlington Heights is also the only town on this page in the northwest suburbs proper — where the week-to-week news is somebody else's beat, done well.

Why Bensenville doesn't make the cut

Bensenville is where the competing measurements become useful.

Walk Score has put Bensenville near the top of this group.

The Census does not.

Only 1.0% ±0.9 of workers walk to work, tied at the bottom of this comparison.

Just 2.4% ±1.2 take public transit, the lowest share here.

Its EPA result is also near the bottom.

Bensenville does have a Metra station on Main Street in its historic core. The problem is that much of the town's retail activity is elsewhere, particularly around Irving Park Road and Route 83.

That breaks the pattern that helps the other downtowns.

The train and the old street grid stayed together. A lot of the shopping migrated toward roads designed for cars.

This doesn't make Bensenville a bad place to live. It makes it a poor recommendation for someone whose first question is, “Where can I drive less?”

And it is a good reason not to choose a suburb because one proprietary score likes it.

Why the train station matters so much

Look at the successful downtowns and you keep finding the same piece of infrastructure in the middle.

La Grange: BNSF station downtown.

Hinsdale: BNSF station downtown.

Downers Grove: Main Street BNSF station downtown.

Elmhurst: UP-West station beside York Street.

Arlington Heights: UP-Northwest station downtown.

Oak Park: Metra plus CTA rail.

These downtowns were shaped around rail service long before the modern suburban shopping center. That left them with compact blocks, commercial buildings close to the station and neighborhoods within walking distance. That shows up two miles apart on the Fox River, where Geneva has the Metra station and St. Charles does not.

It also solves one of the biggest problems with suburban walkability.

Walking to coffee is nice. Walking to coffee and then getting on a train to Chicago is much more useful.

That's why I'd use the station as the starting point if you're trying to find a genuinely walkable suburban address.

Open a map around the station and look at what you can reach in roughly 10 or 15 minutes on foot: groceries, restaurants, pharmacy, parks, library and whatever else you use every week.

Then check the route itself.

A grocery store 0.7 miles away is considerably less exciting when the 0.7 miles includes six lanes of traffic and a crossing apparently designed by someone who dislikes pedestrians.

None of this tells us what happens in February

There is one major hole in the data.

None of the sources here gives us a good comparable measure of sidewalk snow removal, crossing comfort or winter maintenance across these towns.

That matters.

A ten-minute walk in Oak Park or La Grange on a dry September afternoon is not necessarily the same ten-minute walk after six inches of snow and two freeze-thaw cycles have turned the curb into an ice sculpture.

The Census tells us how people commute. The EPA index incorporates things like street intersections, transit and land use.

Neither tells us whether your stroller can get through the corner in February.

If you're considering moving somewhere specifically to walk more, I'd visit the neighborhood on an ordinary bad-weather day before buying.

Real-estate tours have a mysterious tendency to happen when the trees are green.

Walkable Chicago suburbs FAQ

Which Chicago suburb is the most walkable?

Oak Park is the strongest answer among the suburbs we examined.

It has the highest share of residents walking to work at 4.3% ±1.2, the highest transit share at 13.1% ±1.6 and the highest share of households without a vehicle at 11.7% ±1.6.

It also has Metra plus CTA Green and Blue Line service.

If you want something that feels more traditionally suburban, look at addresses near the downtown Metra stations in La Grange, Hinsdale, Downers Grove and Elmhurst.

Can you live in the Chicago suburbs without a car?

Yes, but the list gets short quickly.

Oak Park gives you the strongest evidence that people are already doing it: about one in nine households there has no vehicle.

In many other suburbs, living close to the Metra station and downtown can let you use a car much less without eliminating it entirely.

Our young professionals guide looks more closely at suburbs where transit can support a car-light lifestyle.

Is Walk Score reliable?

It's useful for one particular question: what amenities are near an address?

It is less useful as proof that an entire suburb is walkable.

Walk Score is owned by Redfin and uses a proprietary algorithm. Its exact weights aren't public, and the score does not measure whether residents walk.

Bensenville shows why that matters. It scores relatively well there while finishing at the bottom of this group in Census walking and transit estimates.

Use Walk Score as one input for a specific address rather than a verdict on the town.

Which Chicago suburbs have a Metra station downtown?

Among the places covered here, La Grange, Hinsdale, Downers Grove, Elmhurst, Oak Park and Arlington Heights all have Metra stations in or immediately adjoining their downtown commercial cores.

Bensenville's station is also on Main Street, but much of the town's retail activity sits elsewhere.

What makes a suburban downtown walkable?

A useful downtown needs more than sidewalks and restaurants.

For daily life, I'd look for a train station, groceries or basic shopping, restaurants, parks and other routine destinations within a short walk of housing.

Then look at the streets between them.

That last part is why an address matters so much. Two homes in the same suburb can offer completely different versions of “walkable.”

If you're house hunting, start with the downtown station and draw the area you're genuinely willing to walk from there. Then search for homes inside it.

That will tell you more than the town's score.

The Census figures are American Community Survey 2020-2024 five-year estimates (tables S0801 and DP04), reported with their margins of error. The EPA National Walkability Index is published at the block-group level on 2019 geography; the town figures here are our own population-weighted aggregation of the block groups inside each village, not official EPA scores for the towns. Walk Score is a proprietary product of Redfin. Station locations come from Metra and CTA rosters. Verified August 2026.