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Walk Score Google Mashup

2007_07_27 google greenmap.jpg

How walkable is your neighbourhood? The more you can walk somewhere, the less you have to drive so it makes sense that a community structured for walking would help to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. A new Google maps mashup can called Walk score can give your community a "walkability" rating based on the distance to walkable locations near your address. An interesting concept with a side benefit of finding nearby shops and restaurants that you were not aware of, but it did list some locations that were 40 miles away. We don't know about you, but 40 miles is not really considered walking distance to us.

What does your house score?

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Comments (9)

Walk Score: 95 out of 100
The data is definitely as accurate as it could be (it listed my video rental store as a grocery store).

posted by hja on 2007-07-27 14:54:02
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Not too bad. Well, the app, not my 'hood's walkability (40). Only error I saw was where it listed a couple of neighborhood restaurant as bars.

posted by shani-o on 2007-07-27 15:55:37
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It gave me different readings on different days. The lowest reading seemed to only see whatever was north and west of my house, ignoring a park around the corner. One reading was an 88, the next day when I was showing a friend, it said a 67. Pretty cool when it works, though!

posted by pelicolina on 2007-07-27 18:05:26
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Our current home gets a 68, which is excellent for Phoenix.

Living closer to downtown could yield as high as an 88, but this score is achieved by treating Circle K as a grocery store and claiming some minor book publishers are actually bookstores (which they're not), as well as by treating a two-mile trek as walkable (while four miles was an easy walk in SF, anything over a mile in this climate is not for the faint of heart or under-hydrated).

posted by wende in phoenix on 2007-07-27 20:55:34
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89. And there are a ton of places that it somehow didn't know about. So technically, our score is probably better. Still, pretty cool little thingie.

posted by gretchenkjer on 2007-07-28 02:11:33
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woo! 98!

posted by cyn in sf on 2007-07-28 02:53:58
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89 for downtown Long Beach CA. I should get bonus points for my ocean view.

posted by LBhirise on 2007-07-28 12:10:36
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82. they left out some stuff.

posted by mariegael on 2007-07-30 14:10:04
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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. It doesn’t mean that drive score is better than walk score – they are equal and both necessary in the modern world!

posted by Wella on 2007-12-06 05:17:24
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