| Find Your Home’s Walk Score |
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| Written by Joshua Liberles | |||||||||
| Thursday, 10 January 2008 | |||||||||
 Walk Score is a website that rates a neighborhood’s walkability. Google Maps provides the backbone of the service; Walk Score maps out all of the amenities nearby and calculates a numerical score. An area’s Walk Score ranges from 0 (Driving Only, your life is miserable) to 100 (Walker’s Paradise, ditch the car!). The site is intended for real estate agents, home buyers, and renters to assess the foot-friendliness of a new home. Real estate agents are encouraged to post a property’s Walk Score on the listing’s website to flaunt what’s available nearby.
From Walk Score:
Picture a walkable neighborhood. You lose weight each time you walk to the grocery store. You stumble home from last call without waiting for a cab. You spend less money on your car—or you don't own a car. When you shop, you support your local economy. You talk to your neighbors. There are a variety of factors that improve a neighborhood’s Walk Score. Proximity of stores, public space, schools, and work places boost the score. Other amenities, such as pedestrian-friendly design, a town- or city-center, and dense development also weigh into the equation.
Walking-friendly neighborhoods promote health in the individual, in family relationships, and via social interactions with the community. Sprawl kills.
Two samples from Walk Score:
 I found the tool to be a cool way to find stuff near my current home, and to take a deeper look at ways to avoid using a car. In spite of living in the stretched-out city of Albuquerque, my downtown home scored an impressive 78. Apparently there are cafes, grocery stores, etc. within a one-mile radius that I didn’t even know were there.
The best news of all about Walk Score: more and more people value centralized communities and the ability to walk rather than drive places. If this truly does become a factor in peoples’ housing decisions, the shape of our cities and towns will change for the better and carectomies will abound!
Comments (4)
brian Goldner
said:
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what about a "bike score?" |
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A bike score would be extremely hard to create. there would be many bike lanes & trails to look & enter into a google maps overlay or map. It would take a long time for this to happen. A significant amount of manpower would be needed to make one. Labeling any routes on google, off road trails, etc. |
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Why only walkscore? Maybe also we should use drive score (BTW it’s already used by sellers from Fizber). Or maybe train score? Any more ideas? |
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A bike can travel basically the same as a walker, but about three times faster, so just multiply the 'walk distance' by 3 and that's pretty much your bike score. It's too bad they don't allow such adjustments to compensate for bicycles, and walkers of different abilities. |
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