Our Neighborhood Walk Score

A cou­ple of months ago, I came across a web site that works with Google Maps to eval­u­ate how pedestrian-friendly our address is. The more ameni­ties (shops, restau­rants, gro­cers, parks, libraries, fit­ness cen­ters. etc.) that you can reach within a rea­son­able radius, the higher your ‘walk score’. Up until recently, there was a glitch in the sys­tem that kept it from doing an accu­rate plot of where addresses were in Canada, but after I alerted them, they’ve fixed the prob­lem (it involved some incor­rect con­ver­sion of kilo­me­ters to miles, an issue that has been known to crash Mars probes, among other things). Now, it’s spot on, and I was pleased to see that our address has a walk score of 88 out of a pos­si­ble 100.

When I checked our old address, Lilac Court in Cam­bridge, MA, at Walk Score, we actu­ally had a slightly higher score of 95 (again, out of 100), but that decrease by 7 points hardly feels very sig­nif­i­cant. When I lived at 2 Chester Street, also in Cam­bridge, the score was 91, and in under­grad­u­ate school, when I lived at 616 Straight Street in Cincin­nati, my score was 72. I think my all-time low score (a 0, of course) must have been when I lived on For­est Lawn Road, just out­side of Rochester, New York. The clos­est place to there, on foot, was a bar, well over a mile away along a road with no sidewalk.

As Walk Score points out, “Buy­ing a house in a walk­a­ble neigh­bor­hood is good for your health and good for the envi­ron­ment.” It’s prob­a­bly worth adding that these days, with the price of gas being what it is, that it’s clearly good for your wal­let as well.

When we first moved here and didn’t have a car, I lost a lot of weight, mainly from the amount of walk­ing we did. We walked every­where, both for shop­ping and to get to know the area. Despite not get­ting to see as much of Van­cou­ver as we might have, I cer­tainly was health­ier. After nearly a year of com­mut­ing (mostly by car) to IBM, I really put on the pounds, and it’s tough to get them back off again.

Try out their site, and see how your neigh­bor­hood fares. In most cases, you’ll prob­a­bly be able to pre­dict the score, but once or twice I was sur­prised by either how much lower or higher the score was from what I’d thought it would be.