Measuring Walkability with Walk Score
I’m pretty bearish on so-called ‘neighborhood’ sites right now. Relying on user generated content to provide information on local areas seems to me to be a tenuous proposition at best. This is particular evident at some of the higher-profile sites; the ghost town that is StreetAdvisor, Yourstreet folding up shop (see Yourstreet is Now Empty) – though they, at least, promise to relaunch in a different form.
One neighborhood site that I’ve found particularly useful however is rather beautiful in its simplicity. Walk Score is a mashup that calculates how pedestrian friendly your neighborhood is by asking the question; “How Walkable is your House?”
Punch in your street address and the site maps a series of local landmarks it has pulled from Google Base; grocery stores, restaurants, coffee shops etc. – all relative to your location. Walk Score was refreshingly accurate in my neighborhood at least.
Walk Score™ uses a patent-pending algorithm to calculate the walkability of an address based on:
- The distance to walkable locations near an address.
- Calculating a score for each of these locations.
- Combining these scores into one easy to read Walk Score.
Brilliant. Walkability, at least for me, is huge criteria that goes into finding a new home. My current house scored a meager 62 out of 100, unfortunately. Better than Bill Gates however, whose house scored a microscopic 5 on the scale or George W. Bush’s Crawford, Texas ranch which got the big old Goose Egg.
I’d love to see this kind of integration into a broker or real estate search site. Very valuable information, beautifully executed.
Walk Score was created by the Sightline Institute, Cascadia’s (self-proclaimed) sustainability think tank. (For more on Cascadia, read this).
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7 Comment(s)
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Incredible Agent | Jul 24, 2007 | Reply
That’s great! I found an escort service only 4 streets down from my house and I can walk to it. (Yikes!) Otherwise only a somewhat useful site.
Joel: You have a link to your address on this post. I figure that’s a mistake, since you blurred it out in your graphic.
Galen | Jul 24, 2007 | Reply
Hot – I like the concept a lot. I like sites that clearly solve real people’s problems. It’s rather amazing how few startups end up doing that.
Philippe Marson | Jul 24, 2007 | Reply
Well, there’s certainly something to be said for simplicity.
Their “patent-pending algorithm” looks at the distance to nearby stores, schools and other features (courtesty of Google), and gives more points to places that are closer. Genius!
Unfortunately, they admit that they don’t figure in whether there are sidewalks, freeways, or other impediments (note the wordplay, please), or even calculate the distance via roadways (they use “as-the-crow-flies”, not “as-the-user-walks.”
So you can live in a beautiful tree-lined neighbourhood, made for evening strolling and morning jogging, and your address could garner a dismal score if there is no McDonalds and 7-11 next to your house.
Hmm…
Flawed at best, misleading at worst.
Sometimes simple is best, but sometimes it is just plain… simple-minded.
Alice M | Jul 25, 2007 | Reply
I just tried to check my home’s “walkability” and got a message that they’ve used up their google maps limit. Methinks they need to work on their scalability.
Barrett Niehus | Jul 26, 2007 | Reply
It’s actually a pretty cool concept. When I was on their site, I kept getting an error message on my address. Hopefully they can work out the bugs.
-4MySales
Wella | Dec 5, 2007 | Reply
I believe that walk score is cool, but nowadays more and more people prefer to drive cars. Homes are often located in an area where some establishments are easier to get to by car than on foot. I’ve recently found a type of service on drivescore.fizber.com which is called Drive Score. It shows a map of what establishments are in your neighborhood and calculates a Drive Score based on the number of places within a convenient driving distance. It doesn’t mean that drive score is better than walk score – they are equal and both necessary in the modern world!
Andrew Kyle | Jun 26, 2008 | Reply
Walkscore is brilliant! I’m a Realtor in Calgary Canada and I just added it to all my listings this morning!