Walk Scores
People here at Penn State on Twitter have been sharing their walk scores. There's a Walk Score site that will give you yours. Basically, the higher the score, the more walkable your living space is to shops and things. The idea is to get people to do more walking, which would be better both for them and for the environment.
Not surprisingly, where I live netted a walk score of 0. But it got me thinking about how interesting it would be to do a mashup of the walk score with both the cost-of-living index and crime index data. My guess would be that many of the higher walk scores would yield places that are far more expensive to live (like downtown State College), or places that may be considered unsafe (like many inner-city locations). I think the base of walkability is good, but it's naive to assume that mere laziness prevents people from living in places that are walkable. It's far more likely that income, crime, and other factors like services (the school system, for example) play a much larger role.
So while it's laudable to get people to want to walk, how can the calculator be really useful? I'd say that people should put in their desired monthly cost for housing (indicating income), and a zip code or city area. They should then be presented with a map that shows them the walkable areas within their income (if any), and a rating of the safety for walking in that area.
I just really wish the Walk Score site had an open API. I'd love for us to do a mashup of this one.
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I'd love to see a mashup, too. I'd be really interested to see some of that data considered together. Even closer in to State College, I only have a walk score of 17. It also appears to do distances as the crow flies, and trudging across a field isn't really an option. It also doesn't take into account the walkability of the routes - sidewalks and bike paths are not in abundance in my neck of the valley.
Somehow I completely missed the "entering personal info" part of the commenting. That was me. ;-)
Good thoughts. The Walk Score has some issues, for sure. As Anonymous mentions, the distances are as the crow flies. Hout's is listed as my nearest grocery, but I can't bike across the golf course to get there.
I think on the East Coast, there would be a correlation between walkable neighborhoods and income. On the other hand in San Antonio, the rich neighborhoods are the least walkable; everyone wants a ton of land, and the communities are gated (and thus retail can't develop near them).
I will say that something like the walk score would have been great when we were shopping for houses in SC from afar. Maybe not perfect info but it would give an indication of the differences between Park Forest and Holmes Foster, for example.