Walk Score
How walkable is your house?Walk Score helps people find walkable places to live. Walk Score calculates the walkability of an address by locating nearby stores, restaurants, schools, parks, etc.
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Walkable neighborhoods offer surprising benefits to our health, the environment, and our communities.
If having amentities close to home is important to you, this web app can give you a score which you can use to rate an address. But beware, this app can't judge street width, whether a neighborhood street is a freeway or a number of other important variables which make a huge difference in how walkable an area is.
For example, I checked out my address and got a score of 67. According to Walk Score, this means: "Some stores and amenities are within walking distance, but many everyday trips still require a car." And yet!
I live within 5 blocks of 4 bus lines. I live 3 blocks from the beer and ice cream store, 4 blocks from a pub that serves lunch and dinner, 5 blocks from a laundromat, dry-cleaners, pizza & BBQ, 6 blocks from a hardware and an independent coffee shop. I'm just 10 blocks from Mississippi, and 15 blocks from a library, full service grocery, and hell, even a Starbucks. And my place rates a 67?!?
filled under The Neighborhoods of Portland, Oregon
July 24, 2007 |
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| Comments (4)
This is kinda silly. I got a 71. I mean, I live nearly downtown. We can walk to a huge amount of things. A zillion restaurants, coffee shops, and bars are all within a few blocks of our house.
Safeway is a ten minute walk, as are 3 or 4 movie theaters, the musuems, and the entire downtown transit system. I am a less than 5 minute walk from both max and the streetcar.
I usually drive to the supermarket, though
I think the database they draw from might suck. They're missing tons of stuff nearby from the addresses I've plugged in.
I got a 78. Should I be happy or upset?
Oddly, they didn't list our store (which is worth 22 points), so in reality my address would score 100.
;)
~Chris
I've got various scores (91, 96, 98) for the same downtown address. I think it works in real time, pulling stuff from Google's map database. So for pulling stuff up it's only as accurate as Google, and then also they explain some of the known issues here: http://walkscore.com/how-it-doesnt-work.shtml