I"m not sure I agree with the setup. He's weighting clutter types based on his personal experience, eg a newsstand (=3) is weighted 20 times higher than a tree (=0.15). It's very subjective, and like the model implies a desolate empty parking lot with no trees is somehow ideal. Important factors like urban vitality, utility, or aesthetic quality are not quantified so easily.
If you want to see well-designed cities, look at Europe. Helsinki has both deep integration with nature, and high-quality public services. Denmark does very well with cycling, which improves public health and noise and air quality. Etc. I like to focus on countries that rank highly on the World Happiness Report, and try figure out what they're doing right.
> a desolate empty parking lot with no trees is somehow ideal
The author is trying to measure "claustrophobia" specifically, not ideal-ness. An empty parking lot would be less claustrophobic than most other kinds of places, yes. The measured claustrophobia factor appears to be just one part of a larger analysis that resulted in a NYT article, but unfortunately the article isn't linked.
Greenwich village in third place is weird when most of the residential side streets have dense tree canopies and minimal traffic.
Yeah this is probably the only metric where Rikers island beats SoHo.
An empty parking lot is effectively the gold standard for opposite-of-claustrophobia as the article seems to intend the term. It's the least claustrophobic space possible on the surface of the Earth. Even an open meadow is less open than an empty paved parking lot because it has small bushes and shrubs everywhere. This matches my intuition as a mild sufferer--I actually try to picture a brightly lit gas station parking lot if I'm feeling claustrophobic.