I recently discovered (sadly, I don’t remember how) WalkScore.com, where you can enter your (or any) address and have a “walkability” score calculated for your neighborhood. They use Google Maps to find out how far it is to a long list of important services and amenities (grocery stores, libraries, schools, coffee shops, and the like), and you get points based on how close you are. There are some issues (and they’re very up front about them) with using straight line distance as a proxy for walkability, but it’s not a bad approximation and a good start. There’s also no way they can take into account your preferences for things like schools and restaurants; you’d get points for living next door to a McDonald’s, for example, even if you’d prefer to go a little farther to the nifty local burrito joint.
Our house here in Morris scores a 54 out of a 100, which is probably about as good as you’ll get outside of a dense urban area (the Sears Tower in Chicago scores a whopping 94, for example). Personally, I think Morris is about as walkable/bikable a place as one is likely to ever find: Flat, reasonably compact, and with good roads and (mostly) sidewalks. It’s clear that Google Maps is confused about some of the businesses here in Morris as some of their distances are broken and they don’t know that we have a coffee shop a few blocks away (they list one nearly 25 miles distant!).
In total, it’s a cool idea, and I wish that it was available in the UK as we’re preparing to spend a year in Colchester without a car, and it would be nice to have a similar service while we look at houses and flats.
For amusement check out the scores of Bill Gates’s home and Shrub’s ranch in Crawford. Real environmentalists, these guys :-).
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