What is Your Home’s Walk Score?
August 8th, 2007 | by Rob Goodspeed | Published in General College Park | 9 Comments
A new website designed to assess the walkability of neighborhoods has been causing a buzz on the web lately. Designed to calculate “the walkability of an address by locating nearby stores, restaurants, schools, parks, etc” the site combines data gleaned from Google into one easy-to-understand score ranging from 0 to 100. Under 20 is “driving only,” around 50 has “some walkable locations” and over 90 is a “walker’s paradise.”
Plugging in a few addresses, it seems College Park’s scores range quite widely by neighborhood but none are very good. The University View got 52, City Hall 77, and South Commons 66. Some quick searching shows other well-known college towns generally rate much higher, often at or near 100. My old address in Ann Arbor got 98. Also, Silver Spring, Bethesda, Georgetown, and Dupont Circle all receive scores near 100.
What is your home’s walk score?
August 8th, 2007 at 11:48 pm (#)
It seems that this “walkscore” does not take into consideration the conditions of the actual walk. The distance is one thing, but the environment is another. It doesnt consider the frequency/size of sidewalks, speed of traffic, width of roads or overall design of the built environment. It is all based on distance, which makes suburban places with large, divided highways look more walkable than they actually are.
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August 9th, 2007 at 11:58 am (#)
It’s a shame that CP’s Walk Scores can be so low (especially from my building in South [Campus] Commons). Downtown College Park is a fairly pleasant place to walk – if not for the fact there’s nothing to walk TO. Downtown Silver Spring gets a high walk score, but the blocks are longer and roads are wider and harder to cross.
Not to toot my own horn, but Just Up The Pike wrote about the pedestrian safety issue in Silver Spring today . . .
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August 9th, 2007 at 1:38 pm (#)
Woohoo I win! I scored a nice low 20! Radcliffe DR in College Park.
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August 9th, 2007 at 2:33 pm (#)
I’m not very impressed with the accuracy of these scores. I typed in the addresses of ten different locations that I’m quite familiar with — four in Maryland, four elsewhere in the US, and two in Europe. Their scores correlated quite badly with their actual walkability.
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August 10th, 2007 at 9:09 am (#)
Laughable, I scored 29 and cannot walk to anything. Several of the businesses listed are in homes in the Woods?? I might be able to walk to Shoppers, Home Depot if there was a walking path through BARC or connecting to the Paint Branch Trail. Can’t walk along Metzerott or Univ Blvd, no sidewalks. I’m not sure how walkable.com expects me to get to these places. Maybe I could cut through Buck Lodge Park where a rapist is on the loose. Wonder if it takes into account crime statistics, of course not.
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August 10th, 2007 at 6:33 pm (#)
Interesting website. Perhaps they could include bikeable as the Paint Branch Trail is only a couple hundred feet from my house. That gives you access to about anywhere. I’m sorry, but everyone doesn’t live smack int he middle of a downtown area. I like my quiet culdesac with yards and driveways. The more dense the area, the more foot traffic and noise near your home. Which would be a condo, rental unit, or rowhouse to get a high score on the site.
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August 13th, 2007 at 9:26 am (#)
Hey folks. Its just a web page. You can’t expect a simple map based lookup web site to take into account sidewalks, crime statistics, number of cracks that break your mothers backs.
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August 15th, 2007 at 12:36 pm (#)
It’s a good point. Suburban “blocks” are often much longer and less straight which makes them less attractive to walk on than city blocks. A suburban walk of .5 miles can seem just as long as a city walk of 1 mile.
My old dorm in Ellicott Hall got a pitiful score of 28. But it doesn’t take into account the Incon and Diner. X(
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December 3rd, 2007 at 3:57 pm (#)
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.
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