Sunday, July 22, 2007

How Walkable Is Your Neighborhood?

From Carol Coletta's CEOs For Cities' blog:

This is fun. Get your neighborhood's walkability score here. Just log in with your address. Super simple.

My current Chicago neighborhood scores a 67 out of 100 (no doubt due to too little retail in the immediate vicinity, but plenty within my walking distance -- we're only 17 minutes on foot to Michigan Avenue), but my soon to be neighborhood scores a 93. (One obvious problem with the scoring: Info comes from Google maps which are not always up to date. The Borders across my new location, for instance, is not included in the bookstore listing.)

My downtown Memphis neighborhood scores an 80.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Interesting concept, but a little flawed, simply because it doesn't seem to take into account the actual pedestrian-friendliness of the areas. According to this website, living where we do (two blocks from the Cooper/Young intersection) is a full twenty points less "walkable" than the vicinity around Clark Tower. I understand that East Memphis has more bars/restaurants/shops/movie theatres per square mile than most areas of Midtown, but where would you rather go for a stroll?

Anonymous said...

Ditto. My house in Midtown rated a 42. My office mate's in a horsey subdivision in G'town rated a 62. Another in Cooper-Young was just barely above G'town at 67.

It's apparently easier to walk thru a gated neighborhood, across railroad tracks and Poplar Pike than it is to cross Central Avenue!

TennesseeDrew said...

Yeah, I live in Cooper Young and walk all the time, yet my rating was 64. Just because I'm more than 2 miles from a public library shouldn't affect walkability too much.

Anonymous said...

My collierville neighborhood scored a lowly 7. Yet, my kids can walk to school, the community theatre, park, baseball/soccer fields, church, and loads of their friends' homes. The area is safe to walk in, with well-maintained sidewalks and a dedicated bike/walking path. This calculator assumes that everyone wants to walk to the grocery, beauty shop, and doctor. Sorry, but I'd need about 5 wagons to tote my groceries home from a store, and I don't want to walk home from the beauty shop in the rain--umbrella or not. And the doctor? If I'm sick, I'm not gonna be walking.

Anonymous said...

My neighborhood is G'town rated 15, but my son rides his bike to school pretty much every day 1/2 mile away, and my daughter rides her bike to the library 1 mile away, I ride my bike to the Gtown Center to work out, so it can't be all that bad.
I'd like more sidewalks in Germantown, though.

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