But seriously… Bravo, walkscore people! While I do agree that it demonstrates potential rather than actual accessibility, what a powerful and elegantly simple idea. Keep working on it!

Oh, and if you’re geeked enough about streetscapes, walkability, and place making (and want to know what Main St. got that 100/100), you can watch a 19-minute film I made as my master’s thesis here:

mlive.com/aanews/video/flash/index.ssf?20061001_livelydowntown

(A propos to walkscore, listen for that telltale adjective of a great block: “lots of.” Enjoy, and feel free to email me comments: kirkow [the at symbol] umich.edu.)

That said, the absence of info on sidewalks is HUGE and, based on my own testing of WalkScore, not at all limited to the “quality of sidewalks” but rather the existence of sidewalks period. In fact, in several familar addresses that I tested, if someone unfamilar with the area was doing some trip planning in advance and decided to walk based on the site’s feedback, he or she would find him or herself in some fairly unpleasant/borderline unsafe circumstances. The effect of not taking into consideration the existence of sidewalks is that a virtually unwalkable sprawly strip environment that happens to have a concentration of destinations can score about the same as a extremely walkable traditional, pre-WW2 mixed-use neighborhood. From that standpoint, the site inadvertantly undermines certain critical elements of walkability.

On the plus side, being able to assess barriers would make this a very interesting tool that would show “natural” neighborhoods bounded by these barriers.

I live half a block from CPW.

Which is about right I guess. If anything it should be lower. Some of the shopping indicated is no longer there.

I think the best part of the site is the “How it doesn’t work” page and the “Walkable neighborhoods” page. Those pages pretty much cover all the basics, and I think will help open some people’s eyes to some of the problems in their neighborhoods that they weren’t quite able to put their fingers on.

The actual Walk Score calculator could become a great tool with some more work, but what’s really great about it is that it’s just cool enough to become a meme and get the general public to the site, where they’ll then learn a little about good urban design.

I propose another site for something that would measure “Order-In-ability.” There are at least 100 restaurants that deliver in my neighborhood, not to mention the pharmacies, dry cleaners, hardware stores, grocery stores, etc. that also make free deliveries.

What IS encouraging, however, is how this site is tearing up the blogwaves and reddit and the like due to the overwhelming interest in walkability. That sort of interest will be the thing that compels realtors, google, builders or whoever to hopefully sink more money into finding a way to measure access to transit, quality of sidewalks, and etc.

It’s a huge step in the right direction of creating a tool that gives us an idea of how potentially walkable an area might be. But the usefulness as a tool is secondary—to me at least—to the fact that it’s tapping into a market for which there is pent-up demand, hopefully signifying to those who plan and build our environment that there’s a HUGE market for walkable, transit-accessible, bikeable, dense, green, urban, mixed-use cities, towns, and suburbs.

Kudos

I don’t know where you live, but in my old neighborhood in the Bronx, sure there were crappy places, and I made regular shopping and dining trips to Manhattan on the D train. But there were some good ones too, and there were enough adequate stores and restaurants with the basic life necessities to make it a worthwhile place to live.

It’s quite possible that if the residents who can afford to own cars chose instead to spend their money at stores and restaurants in the neighborhood, then the demand would allow better stores and restaurants to survive. But if a significant minority of residents are driving to Fairway, how can a decent grocery store survive?

1) Walking is a good thing in and of itself.
2) The ability to use walking to get to destinations varies greatly depending on one’s built environment.
3) On an individual level, one should strive to live in a walkable envrionment. On a governmental level, authorities should strive to build walkable communities.

Anything that gets this message out is a good thing. This is version 1.0. Future versions will be tweaked, but the underlying concept is praiseworthy.

Those who live here know that’s not the case, though. For instance, the quality of this information source in NY is very dodgy (e.g., it’s often months out of date; many businesses are operating in some capacity that is very different from what appears on the C of O or Consumer Affairs license, etc.).

Second, it says nothing about whether the amenity is actually any good. I entered my upper Manhattan address, and got a bunch of hits for businesses that don’t exist and/or are so bad or expensive that no one shops there except in desperation. On paper, my neighborhood is extremely walkable; in reality, a large plurality of residence shop, go out to dinner, and seek entertainment outside the neighborhood, by car if so equipped, otherwise by mass transit.

I suspect that this tool can be used to compare locations within a certain range of density/configuration. However, NYC is physically, socially, economically, and demographically so different from the rest of the country that this tool is only marginally applicable. With some tweaking of the rating scale, and some data cleansing built into the “patent applied for” algorithm, it might work, but I don’t really see how it could be useful here as is.