Flutterby™! : Whats your Walk Score? 2008-07-18 05:07:42.350926+00

Whats your Walk Score?

2008-07-18 05:07:42.350926+00 by ziffle 16 comments

I moved from a 68 to an 11 score. I get zero points for a swimming pool. How about you?

I've got a 60. The only thing I wish we had closer is a better grocery store, the South City Market doesn't have "one more thing" sort of items, and sometimes I'll grab the car rather than the bike to hit the Petaluma market, but downtown is just about perfect for a walking destination in the middle of the day.

On the swimming pool, we're thinking about putting in a small one, and I was amused to figure out that our net water consumption should go down versus the same space as a lawn...

On the hill, an 11, but it's probably a zero because of the elevation changes. I put in the downtown office address and got a 92 :)

While walking might not be as practical as they make it out to be, a bicycle with baskets or a trailer can extend that livawalkabikability range quite a bit.

Its interesting to me that for decades the "planners" have been zoning property with all the stores in one place and all the houses somewhere else, and so forth. We now have an entire country planned incorrectly and it is illegal at the moment to put a grocery store near the houses in most areas due to zoning.

And this leads me to freedom; if there were no zoning laws and the government entities actually followed some semblance of freedom and it was illegal for them to plan and therefore it would make no sense for anyone to bribe the "planners" and therefore the whole system would enable entry into the marketplace and what we need would result effortlessly as we needed it instead of waiting until a gigantic crisis emerges and then we would have had to pass laws which are affected by the lobbyists and not what we need after all.

One of the things you see in good urban areas is a small grocery store ever few blocks. Milk, Eggs, Bread, Beer, Wine.. The essentials and a little more. I like them, they get to know you, and you them. A community is formed.

I'm at an 11 in my current suburb home (and my closest "grocery: store is the Chevron Food Center...former midtown ATL home was a 35 but you could easily die trying to walk anywhere there.

Come to think of it, this place is pretty nice for being in semi-rural Pennsylvania. Within two blocks of our house we have a Post Office, an Indian food store with Bollywood movies for rent, a stylist, and a Health Food store. Two doors down we have a small grocery store where we are often found fetching milk for the morning cereal.

58 - but it uses street mileage. There's a path between my condo at the grocery store, pub, cafe, "Curves" and several restaurants. And the things I got knocked for: a pharmacy - I don't use them much, a hardware store - like who is going to walk to pick up a couple sheets of plywood?!?, libraries & bookstores - I'm in a small, unincorporated part of Boulder County so that's understandable. Ironically, for "clothing and music", it chose the local bicycle shop!

Ziffle: The "planners" are only working in response to what has passed as "the American Dream" - a house in the 'burbs with maybe a 15 minute commute to work and a big, green grass lawn. The drive to find a big patch of grass and NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) attitudes are what really kept things un-walkable. The other is cheap gas.

Ask Dan why there isn't light rail to Marin county! And that's a very forward-thinking, community-minded kind of place.

Boulder is planned very different. The focus is has been very similar to the "new urban" concept since the 1960s: Relatively small dwellings packed in closely with large shared open spaces and integrated shopping, offices and services. The biggest problem Boulder encounters is that they extended their planning to the edges of the city, imposing anti-driving street network design even at the borders. That means it's a pain even to bypass Boulder in car. One of those "pains" (a really screwed up intersection in North Boulder) recently resulted in the death of a bicyclist.

And WOW, this thing is way bogus. I just plugged in a condo in Boulder that I've been looking at. It returned:

Restaurants: Providence Catering Coffee Shops: Shamane's Bake Shop Bars: Boulder Beer (a local brewery) Schools: Ghostwriting Unlimited, Inc. Bookstores: AudioBookClick.com Clothing: PTI Orthotic Laboratories

The cities that score high in their ratings are what are known in urban geography as mega-cities. They do not follow the hierarchy of urban areas (i.e., a very large city is surrounded by several next-sized cities which are, in turn, surrounded by several next-sized cities). Instead, mega-cities are signficantly larger than the surrounding urban areas according to the hierarchy. They are most common in developing nations - cities like Sao Paolo, Rio, Mexico City, etc).

Further, the "walkable cities" are also constrained by topography. San Francisco is a peninsula and New York City is an island. Boston is similarly hampered by the Bay and rivers.

The "unwalkable cities" are all Southeastern cities that are entirely unhampered by topography (except Jacksonville) and allowed to sprawl indefinitely. They are all newer cities with transportation systems mostly built since the advent of the automobile. The "walkable cities" are more "walkable" because they developed prior to the automobile - when everyone walked!

What they've done with their "walkable city" score is simply numerically delineate the constraints and conditions of urban growth within a city - not relate the livability of a particular address.

The area I live in is very contrained—the Atlantic Ocean on the east, and the Everglades Swamp to the west (about 10–20 miles inland). I wouldn't call Miami, Ft. Lauderdale and the Palm Beaches all that walkable. Granted, our sprawl is limited more to a north-south axis (about 100 miles, maybe 120, from Jupiter south to Homestead).

I gues 60 isn't bad for my midwestern urban sprawl, but I don't think that the closest restaurant being Burger King is anything to brag about. Many of the other businesses were grossly miscategorized.

My walk score is 35. That’s not so bad. This service can be rather useful especially for those who are going to buy a house or just want to estimate their present location. I have also tried one more service at http://drivescore.fizber.com/. It is called Drive Score. With the help of it you can see how close establishments are by car. My result is 50. Drive Score calculates your score based on the number of places within a convenient driving distance. The greater the number of businesses nearby the higher the drive score.

Awesome! I've got a higher walk score than drive score, despite having free parking downtown...