Via Jon Mandle, an interesting tool to help people looking for a new place to live to assess the walkability of the community in question.
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Walk Score
24 May 2008 12:51 pm
Comments (24)
Interesting tool indeed. One problem with it, at least in my area, is that to the north of me is a road that on a map looks like a regular surface road but that is essentially a highway with no sidewalks, no crosswalks, and no stoplights. Thus all the stuff they list to the north of me is walkable only for an athletic adult who is not especially frightened by cars whooshing past at 65 mph.
That does bring up something interesting though. The area I live in was developed during the postwar period, and back then it was the far western suburbs. Now it's basically part of the city, but the walkability infrastructure (sidewalks and crosswalks) has never been updated to reflect this fact. So you can't walk anywhere even though stuff is close together and there's no substantive reason for it not to be walkable.
The interesting thing is, as far as I can tell this benefits no one. Local businesses would do better if more people could walk there (especially since the parking in the area is pretty bad too) and the people who live here would obviously benefit too. I can't think of a downside, other than the fairly nominal cost of putting in sidewalks and crosswalks and maybe a stoplight. So why doesn't it get fixed?
APS
APS
It is not a very accurate tool at all, there are many things that can mess it up. One is the comment above, another is lack of good information in Google maps. It said the closest movie theatre to my house is 1.8 miles away, but there are two within .4 miles and one of those is .25 miles away. There are also many other amenities that is doesn't show.
One huge thing is missing from Walk Score - public transportation. I live approx 0.2 miles from the Chicago L and 0.5 from a regional rail Metra station. Big factors when I was apartment-hunting.
It's still useful and I don't know any site that compares, but still...
My address gave a score of 71. Not bad until you consider the incredible hills in the area. California Street in San Francisco would be characterized as walkable, but fortunately it has a cable car line.
Interesting idea, though.
Interesting idea, though, like the posters above, I think they have a ways to go. Some of the distances they list seem to be as the crow flies--there is no way to walk there without covering much more ground or, as Ape man notes, going by routes that are extremely hostile to pedestrians. Another oddity is the emphasis on somewhat out of the way or unusual examples of a certain kind of public good. Thus they rightly say there is a public library near my place and seem to have it at the right place on the map, but I was puzzled by the name they gave it, 'the Holocaust Memorial Library', until I realized they must be referring to a room, which I didn;t know about, in the Jewish Community Center diagonally across the street from our local branch of the public library, which goes unmentioned. Very odd that they would track that and not the public library. Also the schools they refer to around here seem to be small private nurseries or perhaps even day care, but they make no reference to the large public high school less than a quarter of a mile away. They seem to be drawing on some pretty odd data bases.
An interesting feature on this tool is how poorly a number of English cities do on walkability. The big culprit there, I suspect, is overzealous planning that basically forbids mixed-use. As a result retailing and services are highly concentrated either in downtowns or large malls; you don't have a lot of the strip malls and neighborhood corner stores that you do in the US (even if a depressingly high proportion of ours are owned by 7-11).
But as good as the score is, it could stand to be improved. Usually, if you live in a UK neighborhood where business has been zoned out of existence, there's at least a way out by public transportation. That's where we go way wrong; our planning pushes low density and thereby makes public transportation less viable, and our budgeting discriminates against public transportation due to this chimera of "trust funds" from fuel taxes.
As the poster mentions above, a lot of US businesses just don't orient themselves to walkers. You'll find neighboring strip malls where you ought to be able to walk from one to the other, only to find a six foot retaining wall or a large shrubbery in the way; you'll also find stores that situate themselves at the back of the lot with parking in front, making things worse for walkers (especially if the wall or shrubbery is present).
My neighborhood in Chicago recently got a new Target that should be a model for how to do a box retailer. The store occupies almost the full lot rather than leaving a vast acreage of empty parking like the K-Mart that was there before, it has one level of underground parking under the entire building, and as for the front entrance, one side of it goes directly out on the sidewalk and the other directly into the parking area. And to cap it all, literally, a green roof. It's the best of all possible worlds; walkable, driveable, busable (bus stop right outside too), sustainable with the green roof, and the parking protected from the weather yet concealed so as not to blight the neighborhood. The only flaw -- and it is a serious one in my view -- is that because it is one single retailer without additional store units, you have too long a street frontage that is just the side wall and windows of the Target store, no other pedestrian traffic.
I wouldn't attach much significance to more than the leading digit of Walkscore-- my address gets a 94, while an address two blocks away gets a 98. It gives a good first approximation to walkability.
Same problem as Ape Man for my neighborhood, and I didn't even score particularly well (in the 50s). Most of my walkable amenities are across a highway that is, for all intents and purposes, uncrossable by pedestrians.
My address scored an 11, and the fact that it scored that high points up another problem with the tool: it gave distances to businesses that had to be as-the-crow-flies distances.
I live towards the back of one of those all-too-typical exurban neighborhoods with only one entrance. Consequently, I'm about 1.2 miles from the main road, by any route that doesn't involve cutting through other people's yards, and roughly 2 miles by foot, bicycle, or car from the nearest business. But though they place my residence accurately on the map, they claim I'm only 0.7 to 0.8 miles from one cluster of businesses, and just over a mile from another.
Note that they include all sorts of local amenities but not places of worship. If you're a religious Jew you need to be able to walk to synagogue. Of course, if you're not a Jew the existence of a synagogue within walking distance of your home is going to be irrelevant to its walkability score. In other words, you have to assume a secular point of view to accept the value of a score that isn't recalculated depending on the religious preferences of the person at the relevant address.
Note that they include all sorts of local amenities but not places of worship. If you're a religious Jew you need to be able to walk to synagogue. Of course, if you're not a Jew the existence of a synagogue within walking distance of your home is going to be irrelevant to its walkability score. In other words, you have to assume a secular point of view to accept the value of a score that isn't recalculated depending on the religious preferences of the person at the relevant address.
Scored a 94 in Los Angeles! There can't be too many places around here where you can do that.
I like it. It's not perfect, but neither was the Tom Thumb. As long as they continue to improve it, it will be a valuable tool.
And for ancedote, the scores for my current place in Kaneohe, HI, my mother's place in Arlington, Va, and my grandmother's place in Maspeth, NY are in the correct order for what I would measure as their walkability.
Another factor they leave out: how walker-friendly the city as a whole is. My address in downtown Washington D.C. gets a 95, while the address of a friend in downtown Seattle gets a 100. And for everyday life, that order may be correct. But there's a much better chance that I can walk to destinations I don't visit everyday, such as the houses of friends or major chain retailers. Those things tend to be walkable or Metro-able here in DC, whereas you essentially need a car to go anywhere outside of downtown in Seattle.
My present address, 20 blocks from the nearest grocer and 10 from the nearest pharmacy, scored 80. My previous address, two blocks from the nearest grocer and six from the nearest pharmacy, scored 51. Neither map showed the stores. Maybe it works better where you live.
I'm having the opposite problem from a number of people above. I live in a fairly walkable neighborhod - not an urban downtown, but not sprawl, either - and my house only got a 35.
I walk my 5-year-old to a school that isn't in their database.
Hmmm... Like other people, I haven't found this too good for my case. My house in Oklahoma City scores a 68, which is far better than I thought it would. The map nicely points out all the decent places in the neighborhood that we would love to be able to walk to. The problem? Our neighborhood, like virtually every urban residential area in Oklahoma, has -- get ready -- no sidewalks. Moving here after 10 years in San Francisco, and 5 in Buenos Aires prior to that, is still traumatic for us...
Yeah, I think they underrated my neighborhood, but it is the flipside of the problem above: the streets around here all have sidewalks, it is mostly level, it is a neighborhood of front porches and mature trees, and so on. So, people in the neighborhood are often walking around just for the sake of a pleasant walk, and of course that makes it more pleasant to walk to any of the local amenities. But apparently the quality of the walk itself is currently not reflected in the methodology.
Also, as noted there were some real bugs. For example, I live near a very large and attractive city park, the nearest entrance to which is about 1/3 of a mile away. But they had it almost a mile away, which I can only assume is to some random point in the middle of the park.
But I think the basic idea is a good one, so hopefully all this gets improved over time (and they figure out a way to address the quality of the relevant walk, not just distances).
Not much to add, but when I ran this for my old neighborhood [which was rich with independent booksellers and libraries], WalkScore had the porn shop listed first.
So yeah, maybe some bugs to work out...
I had fun with it. Interestingly, I grew up in a neighborhood with a pretty high number, 79, and eventually bought a house in a neighborhood with the same number.
It would be useful to be able to add some of your own data points and also to rank their importance, and also to do the inverse--take out things that are not important to you. I might add--or rank higher--churches in my denomination, libraries, etc., and take out some things.
As for the poor soul who left San Francisco for Oklahoma City, I say go back, man!
Went from a 95 to a 0. It would be intersting to see this plotted against age.
For my address (a Maryland suburb of DC), Walk Score makes some bizarrely amusing errors. For example:
Walk Score includes my town in its list of nearby PARKS. Walk Score's "read the reviews" link for this "park" goes instead to reviews of a nearby bar. Moreover, Walk Score's list of bars includes neither that bar nor most other nearby bars.
Of the 8 stores in Walk Score's list of nearby hardware stores, only two are real hardware stores. The others are companies that install floors, windows, and the like.
Walk Score's score for my neighborhood is 60. This is more accurate than I might have expected, given the above errors. But Walk Score's score for a MUCH more walkable town in northern Italy is only 40.
Comments closed June 07, 2008.
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Heads in the Sand
Cool, my place got a 97!
Posted by live | May 24, 2008 1:08 PM