How walkable is your neighborhood?

brady bunch house scores an 80

I showed walkscore to Mr. Jaq last weekend for our new place, which gets a 97 (but that's what you'd hope for, in the middle of downtown).

yaow nice jaq

98 at home, 83 at work.

bill gates' scores a 6 that dick

well, it's on top of a bar pretty much and across from a bookstore - what more do we need, right? (xpost)

New work location gets a sad 26 :(

86. Not bad, considering there's (relatively) fuck-all to do within walking distance.

Walk Score: 89 out of 100 BITCHES

Mine is 63, but the site seems to think there's an Old Navy 0.3 miles from my house. The accurate business listed as 0.3 miles away is Welcome Inn Bar, which is extra scuzzy.

Also it says the nearest grocery store is a Circle K.

46, and that's with them getting libraries, book stores and the grocery store wrong. Actual walkability probably in the 30s. Factoring in weather, 12.

Actually I'd rather have a low walkable score if it means having a low people shooting in the street score as well.

That's what I thought this was going to be about! Which I think would be maybe 33 in my neighborhood.

92, but I'm still going to take the bus! Haha.

this is rubbish

Yeah, none of the places in my neighborhood are places I ever want to walk to.

88

97. I'm trying to think what's missing and can't come up with anything. Pawnshop maybe?

that site knows nothing about canada

hmm 66. Within a ten minute walk I can get to a grocery store, a farmers market, a drug store, 8 restaurants, a Radio Shack, a movie theatre, a dry cleaners, a wine seller, a camera shoppe and light rail that will take me downtown to work or the airport or to the library.

WHAT MORE DO U NEED

well, montreal anyway - maybe it's y'know the 'french thing'
xpost

aka rjg otm

Within a ten minute walk I can probably get to over 50 restaurants, cafes and bars. Still only 76.

83, depending on how brave you are after dark

I live in the centre of Oxford, which you can walk across in about thirty seconds and is mostly pedestrianised. I can't be more than ten minutes from 100 pubs, 30 bars, 50 restaurants, 20 bookshops, 4 cinemas, 4 supermarkets, etc. I got 47. Obviously not many UK businesses are on Google maps yet.

it's a pretty brilliant/transparent marketing scheme anyway

58, but they get a lot of things wrong. The nearest park is listed as being miles away, but that's not including the small one by the windmill & science centre, and the one in the opposite direction from town (I doubt either of these have a yellow pages listing, so that might be why they don't show up). It also lists the nearest cinema as Just the Tonic, which is a comedy club and not a cinema. Plus, it obviously has no idea about its music listing, as most of the good music is put on by independent promoters, who move about, so it's sometimes near and sometimes far.

woohoo! 86.

It's true, too.

52. Lots of things within a few blocks, but it's a tiny town with no bookstores in a dry county.

94

My work location gets a 97.

My work also got a 97. Home = 75.

this is rubbish

-- RJG, Tuesday, August 28, 2007 7:03 PM (38 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

After spending an extra 5 minutes on the site, I am inclined to agree with this.

We'll be the first to admit that Walk Score is just an approximation of walkability. There are a number of factors that contribute to walkability that are not part of our algorithm:

* Street width and block length: Narrow streets slow down traffic. Short blocks make it easier to navigate the grid.
* Safety: How much crime is in the neighborhood? How many traffic accidents are there? Are crosswalks well marked and streets well lit?
* Pedestrian-friendly design: Are there walking paths? Are buildings close to the sidewalk with parking in back? Are sidewalks shaded by trees?
* Topography: Hills can make walking difficult, especially if you're carrying groceries.
* Public transit: Good public transit is important for walkable neighborhoods.
* Freeways and bodies of water: Freeways can divide neighborhoods. Swimming is harder than walking.
* Weather: In some places it's just too hot or cold to walk regularly.

I still walk everywhere I really need to go, though, except work or places I'm meeting other people.

Street width and block length: Narrow streets slow down traffic. Short blocks make it easier to navigate the grid.

If by easier they mean quicker, then no: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxicab_geometry

it's about walking.

Chicago has alleys, and they are your friends.

My house scored 12, which is the lowest address on this thread with the exception of Bill Gates. Oh, rural life. (That, people, is why we pollute the environment driving cars everywhere around here! The alternative is being housebound!)

xpost, Yes, but if they run at right angles to the streets, they don't actually save you much time, just like it makes no difference which EW street you cut across to get to the NS street your destination is on. They save no time at all if they're so narrow that you're not cutting off a significant corner when you cross them diagonally. Of course, the above assumes all the other pedestrians are point-like and the temperature is absolute zero.

Wow, my work got 100.

nyc?

I'm surprised. My home only gets 33, but my new place gets 76

58 at home, 95 at work, which is . . . wrong. My office is in downtown Cleveland, but on the northernmost street before the freeway, and you'd be hard-pressed to live downtown without a car, mainly because there are no grocery stores. (To speak of. There are a couple of "gourmet" stores, but nobody who lives in downtown Cleveland is doing their regular shopping there.) Meanwhile, I could easily envision living without a car where I live (about 8 miles outside downtown), and in fact there are clearly people who do.

95! But almost all of the places they list are kinda wierd. Like, the local cinema is the last porn theater in town. The local "clothes and music" emporium is fictional, as far as I can tell, and the bookstore is Korean-only. But, yes, it's very walkable here.

Who says you need those things, anyway? I do not need schools... in fact, I prefer to not have them nearby. But Radio Shack right around the corner? Sweet. A frame shop on my block that's very reasonable? Yes, plz.

I got 49 but some of the stuff they listed was completely unwalkable (a bar on 5th street???)

My new neighbourhood is 46, the one I just moved from was 85.

But I live somewhere posh now. Posh people don't walk.

Here, poor people do. But the posh people don't care how far the poor have to walk or whether they have sidewalks to do it on.

78, seems low for Capital Hill (Seattle). I think there's some things missing. OTOH work 46 = more proof I should quit the office park.

94/100 which is pretty accurate. Within a few blocks I have several grocery options, convenience stores, liquor, many kinds of take-out, a few coffee shops, bars, a bookstore (though not such a great one), a couple of small parks, a decent hardware store, etc. There's a movie theater, albeit a mall multiplex, within about a 10-15 minute walk. I leave my neighborhood a fair amount but I could certainly get by without doing so, and I own a car but really only use it for work and carting drums around.

some of the stuff they listed was completely unwalkable (a bar on 5th street???)

where are you?

the posh people don't care how far the poor have to walk or whether they have sidewalks to do it on.

there's no "posh" in Austin, ask anybody. :)

But yeah, the newer parts of the city, like anything built in the last 20-30 years, make no concessions at all to people who might want to walk somewhere. As many a frat dayy yelled at me out their window as I rode my bike, "Get a car!"

frat daddy, i meant

This is bullshit. My place in bushwick = 82; my place in downtown williamsburg = 82

(job in greenwich village = 100)

Ouch, my parents' place gets a 15. That's accurate too though - it's probably the most remote you can possibly be in a somewhat major US city - the bus doesn't even run on weekends.

46. I think the "cold" factor may be at play here.

Ha, my parents house gets a zero.

Weird - there's something a few blocks from my parents house called the Whiteford Memorial Library that I have never heard of.

11 - I'm the new loser!

Oops, sry JJ's parents

home 98, work 100

bitches

John's parents could walk to a cornfield. Doesn't that count for something?

My address scores a 38. The library is less than a mile from my house, also a grocery store, elementary school, coffee shop, and park. Geography versus quality is so not in there - I have not and will not eat at Casey's Pizza. But there are pizza places that are good that are within walking distance. As long as you aren't afraid of freezing cold, ice, or snow.

how wankable is your neighbor's wood? </parroty thread>

where i lived till recently: 85
where i just moved to and dislike: 49
work which is really not walkable to anything: 58

ugh

where i grew up: 65

cisco, ut gets the full 0

http://www.walkscore.com/get-score.php?street=84515&go=Go

My house itself - 67
Round the corner, where I used to live - 85*
Work - 93

*Not sure quite why there's such a significant gap for what is about a five minute walk. This is a bit rubbish I think.

Where I grew up - 44, which makes sense as it is not particularly walkable to anywhere good.

My flat three years ago - 76

100 Oxford Street - gets the wrong place entirely

Work - 96
Home - 73

It is a bit dodgy though, I looked up my mum's house and it says the nearest park is 1.04 miles away (a caravan park!), despite there being a big fuck off actual real park round the corner.

My house gets the grand total of 9. Perhaps that's because I live in a field, miles from anywhere.

Home - 89 (I have not heard of half the places they list, and they miss out really obvious ones, but they have my fave chinese)
Work - 91 which is weird because this location is way less walkable than the old one (which also scored 91, because it missed out the much closer coffee shop and sainsburys)

Home - 92

Home walkscore = 60 but it disregards Millfields (Recreation ground) and Hackney marshes as my nearest 'park' which seems a bit unfair.

It wants me to walk around my library that's 10 minutes walk away and swim across a river to a library 4 miles away.

CJ lives on the moon!

75 - it appears to think my nearest park is actually a car park, and my nearest music shop is a PR company.

Umm, definitely flawed - my house gets a 25 but it ignores a shop a couple of hundred yards away, a park a lot nearer than the park they use, and the fact that I live next to a open access field which my kids use as a park.

how are the UKers getting their addresses to work?? it keeps saying it can't find my address, even when i use google maps' preferred way of writing it

Seems to work fine for me.

it doesn't seem to like post codes

it liked mine

That's funny, it told me your postcode was gay.

83 at home, 97 at work.

UK postcodes worked for me, for home and work, both of which it rates in the 60s (home = middle of nowhere, can't walk more than a mile in any direction before dangerous pavement-less roads so not actually a walkable route to some of its suggestions, not many shops and none after 8pm, no public transport after 7pm; work = on the edge of a small city, pretty much every kind of shop, bar and entertainment 20 minutes' walk away, a few things closer).

The park thing is annoying me too. It seems to list only commercial "parks", so public town parks aren't included but if some farm's wholesale store has an angry goat petting farm for the kids to look at while their parents load slabs of cow into the 4x4 that gets listed. And it says the closest bar to work is 0.26 miles away, but since there's a river in the way I'd have to walk nearly a mile and walk past at least 4 other pubs to get there.

Walk Score: 48 out of 100

Not Walkable: Only a few destinations are within easy walking range. For most errands, driving or public transportation is a must.

I have a bone to pick with this website's score, though. Directly behind me is a baseball complex and directly in front of me is a nice park. About four minutes away is a historic/touristy part of town with coffee shops and stores and such.

Maybe walkscore.com knows that I would have to walk thru a prostitute infested few blocks to get there?!?!

Ha. I just realized that it thought the closest gay bar was a movie theatre and that the Baptist church was a place of education.

"Clothing and Music" is basically a long list of shoe shops. Ta.

The first "Clothing and Music" place it lists for me is a factory that makes camping/hiking gear - and it isn't even the nearest factory that does that!

Haha I went back and took a bit more notice of what it said.

Mine invents a cinema that doesn't exist (it's a shop, I think), but ignores two cinemas that are close. It lists a library a mile away, but ignores one about 1/4 mile away. It ignores Marks and Spencer (approx 300 yards away!) but lists Iceland across the road from it.

Ahahaha my apartment not far from the ghetto, on a street where someone got mugged recently, and which is, based on the online records, absolutely CRAWLING with registered sex offenders, got an 89. My parents' house on a lakeshore in the amazingly beautiful country where nothing bad ever happens except traffic accidents got a 3. TAKE THAT BITCHAS

all right, i just put in my post code with no spaces and it worked - i got an 80

it came up with weird things i've never heard of in hackney (the "couture digital" cinema? the "cock tavern"??) but doesn't seem to know about tre viet, green papaya, the hackney empire, etc.

the "cock tavern"??

isnt this behind hackney empire?

some of the stuff they listed was completely unwalkable (a bar on 5th street???)

where are you?

290 and Berkman.

Kenan you've been gone for awhile and are missing the new skyline of highrises going up south of Downtown. Half a million dollars for an apt? Also see the impossibly expensive boutiques and art galleries that have taken over 2nd street.

Home got 80, which, as everyone else has said, ignored loads of obvious stuff. Biggest flaw - thinking Mudchute City Farm was my closest park when I have Greenwich Park and Blackheath within actual walking distance. I think Rebecca's point about commercial places comes into play there.

Work - 95 - oddly enough it seems to think the offices of Bizarre magazine are my closest bookshop. Selling any novels Dom?

Also to Kenan: Homes in Hyde Park regularly go for $1 mil now and a house in our neighborhood, the Hood near Reagan High, just sold for $500k. This is insane. Pretty soon there will be no working class in Austin. They'll all be forced to Del Valle and Manor.

work - 80
home - only a 78, which is surprising since I'm a stone's throw from two drugstores, a major, semi-posh supermarket, a variety of restaurants and bars, AND tranny hookers

My house got a 75. Closest bookstore is apparently "Bethlahem Christian."

Also, this doesn't take into account the evenings. The failed drive by on Friday night is not figured in.

Haha yeah, when I saw "walkable" the first thing I thought was "safe". I wouldn't walk anywhere in my neighborhood after dark.

Yeah, this is borderline worthless. I got a 66 based on all kind of false positives (places that have closed, a 'grocery store' that's little more than a stop'n'rob, the Bob Bullock history museum counted as a movie theater.)

Got $13 bucks to blow on a shark documentary?

Oh man, my 'bookstore' is in the lobby of a hospital!

ethan is right! i have never noticed it. closer to me are the dolphin and pub on the park. i will keep an eye peeled for the cock.

apparently, couture digital is a high-end home cinema and audio installation outfit. not exactly relevant for walkers.

74 at home and a 98 at work, which is fucking ridiculously untrue. they're claiming a tiny coffee shop that happens to sell fruit and has a beverages case as a grocery store where my work is, for example.

i mean, they're claiming that the closest bar to me is a mile and a half away which is basically patently untrue--it's closer to my house than the closest bar is to my workplace, despite their claims to the contrary.

i mean i don't really expect them to count the ease of the walk or other subjectives but to completely leave out several pretty old at this point establishments while claiming other establishments are things that they aren't seems kind of sketchy?

especially if by 'seems kind of sketchy' you mean 'renders the whole excercise completely worthless.'

yeah my job has two seven elevens that are grocery stores. FOR HOMELESS PEOPLE

oh man there was an epic lns post the other day by some dude who caught his new ladyfriend eating a hot dog from a 7/11 and he wanted to know if he should dump her over eating something so wrong and disgusting

the point is, leveraging google maps like it's in any way accurate is a big fucking mistake, and once again, we must remember GARBAGE IN GARBAGE OUT

(it was at lunchtime, not like 3am drunk bad decision making)

There was a sad period of my life when I pretty much used 7-11 as a grocery store.

at least a 7/11 sells like doritos and hot dogs. i mean, a fucking hole in the wall coffee shop that doesn't actually sell groceries at all is a grocery store on google now? o rly?

my last apt got an 89 out of 100 which i'd say is accurate EXCEPT FOR THE FACT THAT THEY ARE CALLING MY FAVORITE COFFEE SHOP IN THE ENTIRE WORLD BY THE WRONG NAME.

o google u make me so mad

The two closest "movie theaters" to me are actually a live theater space and a concert venue. One of the "schools" in my neighborhood is an H&R Block. Otherwise, not too many glitches.

hahaha wait my apt BEFORE last got a 100 out of 100! if they counted central park AS A PARK maybe it would've gotten the elusive 110%!

it doesn't inspire much confidence that this is going to work at all

I tried my old place, and it listed one of my neighbors as a coffee shop.

did you ever try getting coffee from them? maybe they're amenable.

I should mention that I was in an apartment building, and it didn't specify what apartment said person was in.

maybe you actually lived in a coffee shop the whole time and didn't realize it?

My current workplace supposedly gets a 91, but more than one of the "hardware store" hits are actually for associations. And LOLZ at the libraries, almost all of which are also part of associations and not open to the public.

My home showed up as 69, but they missed Whole Foods under grocery stores. Granted, I wouldn't go there unless I was so pressed for time that it made up for the cost, but FAIL. And tsk tsk; so many places that have been closed for YEARS.

my apt: 60
my work: 97
my parents' house: 0

my parents' house gets a 46, which is funny when you consider that there are no sidewalks and a speed limit of 50 mph

also, one of the "walkable" destinations - a movie theater - is 5.86 miles away

some day i'll have to try that

57 for home and 49 for work. good thing i hate walking, i guess.

Crazy. My work get 92 and my house gets 77. I think of my house as more walkable because there are six bars, four restaurants and a supermarket within a three block radius.

This site is somewhat flawed. I would not say for example that the Carl Jung Institute is a school.

What neighborhood are you in, Bill?

It also missed a bunch of parks in my neighborhood (xpost)

88 at home (same as michael white, my neighbor... duh)

but how's this: my office (which is kinda located in a remote no-man's land as far as SF goes) scores a 91...?

85/77 - not bad for flyover red state lawlz

work = 100
home = 99
aka "manhattan"

P.S. a good way for them to improve this would be to judge the walkability of a given stretch by how many businesses are located along the way. I did this for where I grew up and it was all "there's a library just a couple miles from here," despite those couple miles consisting in large part of a highway crossing surrounded by desert.

But I suppose that technique might wind up telling you a strip mall is better walking than a suburban neighborhood...

Really they should just base the answers on asking us.

15

: (

The only amenities in my neighborhood are a convinience store, a park, and (who knows why) a flooring store.

Naturally, I live at the other end of the neighborhood from the convenience store, park, and (yes) flooring store.

haha, where do you live??

98

Moving in a couple days, though. New address only 86.

Rev, you need to head south. Mr. Jaq is convinced there are nefarious forces at work on the walkscore database, or that it only shows you the businesses that have paid $$ or something. Which is possible, except the taco truck just down the block shows up in the listings for our current place (43 - moderately scary and dangerous in the day and exceptionally so at night).

No, no. That's not just according to the site, those are actually the only things near where I live. (The site doesn't register the random-ass flooring store, obv. Who the hell puts a flooring store in a residential neighborhood, esp. one isolated from the main part of the city?) And I could move any direction and be closer to stuff, except north, which would put me in water. I don't really have that much choice about where I'm living at the moment, anyway, (back in with the 'rents, gah) although I'm hoping to remedy that as soon as possible.

Ms. Misery: Suburban Seattle

Like, you have to understand that I-5 is between my neighborhood and the rest of Everett.

Home: 82

Haha the first 5 bookstores it lists are all Hasidic. And it has no clue about ANY of the parks we regularly walk to.

Work (in Chelsea): 95

98

At least in MPLS/STPL, the score is inversely proportional to the probablility of getting mugged etc.

What neighborhood are you in, Bill?

Technically, North Center. Basically, one block south of Welles Park.

I'm moving to a place with a walkscore of 8 next week. That said, at least the second closest place is a bar, at 1.71 miles.

HAHAHA, the house I grew up in scores a zero.

I don't care if you guys stalk my parents and the developmentally delayed people they keep in the basement to get govt. money, is why I poset the actual link. That and all the businesses listed are hilarious. Mormon Church is the nearest "library."

Ha! My home got a 0, and I just got back from a fabulous moonlight walk with the dog on the land bank trail across the street.

My family's house is on a one-mile-square block surrounded by 50 mph roads with no sidewalks. :(

Ahahaha my apartment not far from the ghetto, on a street where someone got mugged recently, and which is, based on the online records, absolutely CRAWLING with registered sex offenders, got an 89. My parents' house on a lakeshore in the amazingly beautiful country where nothing bad ever happens except traffic accidents got a 3. TAKE THAT BITCHAS

This kind of sums up the problem with this website, in that it assumes that by and large the only reason people walk anywhere is in order to buy stuff.

Well yeah. Whole thread is blithely ignoring the fact that the site is trying to tell you how to walk to Your Life, and people on long beautiful country roads are walking as an activity in itself. But that's okay.

Who the hell puts a flooring store in a residential neighborhood,

Residents be home renovating.

I suppose it's beyond the scope of this site's current build but finding a way to integrate crime statistics would certainly make it more useful.

are parks even part of the formula?

sidewalks obviously aren't