How Walk-Friendly is Your Neighbourhood?
We at blogTO obviously love a great Google Maps Mashup, so here's another mapping tool to distract you from your hard working Friday.
Walk Score, a nifty little site that helps explain why you live in Toronto and not L.A., will rate a street address based on its walk-ability level. My place, near Bathurst and Queen, gets a score of 71 out of 100 (compared to 31 for parts of car-happy Mississauga).
The site uses an algorithm to determine the walk-ability score of a specific address. The easier it is to walk to stores, parks, schools and restaurants, the higher the score. The ratings can be a suburban "Driving Only" (0-25 out of 100) all the way up to a "Walkers' Paradise" (90-100 out of 100).
Unless you hate people and exercise, the idea of a walkable city is obviously a good thing. More walking usually means fewer cars and pollution, more social interaction and exercise. On the more academic side, there's Robert Putnam (the Harvard Prof who was mentioned in this New Yorker Magazine piece on commuting) who sees people living in a triangle where each of the three points represent where you sleep, work and shop. Generally, the smaller the triangle, the happier you are (which means I'm pretty happy - I sleep, work and shop in a 4 km triangle).
The site would be way useful if you're looking to move to a less car-reliant area or are just interested to see how much more walk-able your Toronto neighbourhood is compared to your friend from Oakville (I found a score of 22 in a randomly selected Oakville 'hood in case you're wondering). Or use the site to determine how easy it is to stumble home from a good time (I get eight bars listed within 700 meters of my comfy bed!).
Photo: From Moonwire from the blogTO Flickr pool
Comments (17)
The highest I could find ( in my very quick, non-scientific study ) was 300 Yonge st, at a walk-ability of 82.
My Current address in the beaches, near St. John's Norway, rates 46. - Which I suppose makes sense, there's nothing within a 5 minute walk, (unless I want cigarettes, and I don't smoke) but quite a bit once I hit 10 minutes. As someone with no car though, I certainly don't find it inconvenient to live here.
Looks like all scores from Toronto will be skewed low, because the algorithm isn't working for schools. The closest school to King/Bathurst is listed as over 75km away, and when I did a search within Etobicoke, it listed that same closest school (about 100km away).
The school function was completely out of wack. My neighbourhood has 6 schools which are in walking distance (between 5-15 minutes walk away), and they were totally lost.
Other then that, it's a pretty neat tool.
The school-finding is terrible for Ottawa addresses, as well.
It's perhaps understandable that Google (which supplies the location data along with the maps) doesn't know about all of the coffee shops, and categorizing a corner store under "groceries" is not entirely wrong, but it also lists hotels as movie theatres and Baskin Robbins as a bar!
Despite the poor data quality, Walk Score is a neat tool.
All of the local, small businesses in my area are not indexed by Google, which also skews the results, in addition to the school ommission (we have 9 in an 11-minute walking distance, but none listed). Because we have a lot of family-owned small shops that are not indexed by Google, my neighbourhood ranked low at 41. (I'm not pretending that my neighbourhood deserves to be in the 70s or 80s, but low 40s is definitely a result of poor data rather than poor planning.)
Great tool, but it seriously needs to work on that data set.
I think Canadian numbers are skewed downwards also because the numbers are based on google listings, which are much more numberous in the US then here. Otherwise it's pretty awesome
I agree the school info is all wrong, we may not have the safest neighbourhood at Keels and Sheppard, but we do have at least 6 catholic and public schools in the area.
we rate a 31 on your scale. But who walks anyway .. it's just not safe.
I live in an area that has ditches instead of sidewalks. Walkers have to share the roads with cars. Nope. I don't live in Newmarket, but a suburban area in Etobicoke.
There is one (tiny and expensive) IGA (as well as a tiny home hardware, pharmacy and bank) about a 5-10 minute walk away. Everything else is at least 20 minutes+
Still somehow got a 43. I know it doesn't take the lack of sidewalks into account, but only having one store (nothing in the plaza other than the IGA shows up) within reasonable walking distance I think would warrant less than a 43.
I was actually quite disappointed in this. I live in the Bathurst/St. Clair area. Even though everything is within walking distance I expected it to miss a lot of the small fruit markets, even the bakery. But it even misses the two closest chain grocery stores, five minute and ten minute walks, plus the Shopper's I can basically spit on from my home.
As far as the schools go, Google simply doesn't show any Canadian ones, I looked up the schools and they list the closest ones in New York state.
I think we all agree... a great idea, but the data harvesting system fails to produce anywhere near accurate results.
In addition to the schools, I found the library listings really incomplete. I live less than a 5 minute walk from a library and yet the closest this listed was 3.2 miles (North York Central).
Also, for movie theatres it listed the Glen Groves Suites. That's an apartment/hotel, not a movie house. Hmmmm. Needs more information added.
Finally, walkability depends on what Jane Jacobs called "Eyes on the street". You can live close to lots of stores but if the residential set up is all high-rises, set back from the street with no windows looking out on public space, it's not so safe to walk there. Look at Regent Park as an example.
As you obviously saw, Walk Score ishaving a litlte trouble with the data on Canadian addresses and is working to fix it! Check back in bit.
Scored a 62 in my beaches area, Kingston and Glen Manor. Not bad, but some stuff isn't indexed. Sightline, email us blogtO-ers and let us know when it's "fixed".
More comments about walkscore here: http://torontoist.com/2007/07/perambulation_n.php#post-comment
Same picture. Same writer?
Heh, had a lot of fun trying to find locations in Toronto that score 0/100 and 100/100 (possible, after they removed the school bug). Found both. 0/100 in the middle of the Rouge Park (cheating, I know :-)) and 100/100 at Yonge and St. Clair (surprisingly, it beat Yonge & Bloor/Eglinton/College/Queen/Dundas).
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