This Is the Worst American City to Walk a Dog

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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This Is the Worst American City to Walk a Dog

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Owning a dog can be expensive and time-consuming. This has not kept dogs from being the most widely owned pets in America. A total of 48,255,413 households have a dog. That is almost 50% higher than cat ownership.

Dog ownership can cost over $1,000 a year. In the first year, buying a puppy can cost several hundred dollars. The Spruce Pets puts annual dog ownership costs between $1,500 and $9,900.

Many dogs spend some time outdoors. Inventions like the electric fence allow dogs to live freely outside the house but in a contained area. Many dogs are walked by their owners, often several times a day.

24/7 Tempo has picked the worst city to walk your dog in, based on a report from LawnStarter. In the report, 174 of America’s largest cities were ranked on a 100-point scale based on their walkability, dog-friendly environment, safety and services related to dog walking.
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Walkability is a score that takes into account pedestrian access and comfort. Can residents run errands without a car? Is there access to footpaths or sidewalks, and are these comfortable routes to businesses and parks?

In addition to a city’s walkability, are the sidewalks large enough to safely walk a dog past a group of people or another dog walker? LawnStarter’s environment metric takes into account the number of dog-friendly trails in a city, as well as the city’s ranking in its Best Dog Park Cities list.

The dog walking services ranking includes the number of for-hire dog walkers per capita and their average cost, while the safety metric includes pedestrian deaths per capita.

The worst city to walk a dog is Jackson, Mississippi. Here are the details:

  • Overall score: 25.38
  • Walkability rank: 161st
  • Environment rank: 163rd
  • Services rank: 106th
  • Safety rank: 168th
  • Population: 153,701

Click here to see the 25 worst cities in which to walk a dog.
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Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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