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You are here: Home / Politics / Domestic Politics / Open Thread: Walkability

Open Thread: Walkability

by Anne Laurie|  August 24, 20101:06 am| 49 Comments

This post is in: Domestic Politics, Excellent Links

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I owe a commentor whose name I can’t find right now thanks for alerting me to the Walk Score website, which “ranks 2,508 neighborhoods in the largest 40 U.S. cities to help you find a walkable place to live.” You can also type in an address and get a “walkability score” for an individual home or business.

I was not surprised that our house, in a working-class city north of Boston, scored 74 points out of a possible 100, “Very Walkable — Most errands can be accomplished on foot”. When we were house-hunting, 18 years ago, finding a place with access to public transit into Boston (for me) and also reasonable highway access to Cambridge (for the Spousal Unit) was near the top of our list. But that relatively high number also exposes some of the weaknesses of their scoring system. Theoretically, we’re only half a mile from a good-sized grocery store as the crow flies, but if you’re not a corvid, you have to take a somewhat less direct path which crosses two of the busiest, most dangerous highway off-ramp exits in a state renowned for reckless drivers. So unless you are fitter and a great deal fleeter than I, schlepping the shopping home on foot may be a little more intensely aerobic than the cheerful Walk Score graphics indicate. Also, “public transit” can be more of an ideal than a practical tool, given ever-shifting community funding issues; schedules change, routes are dropped, and even a fixed-line rail system isn’t immune to political shifts. The rail station closest to our house was shuttered when a new “regional transportation center” opened a mile further away, even though it had been expensively renovated by the interstate bus services who put in a nice new building just a few years earlier. The new RTC was built on a former notorious brownfield (Superfund) site, largely with federal funding that wouldn’t have been otherwise available. It’s become the the ‘hub’ for a mini-boom of extended-stay-hotel and corporate-headquarter construction, but at the expense of the established small retail businesses and householders convenient to the old station.

And there’s another piece of the “car-free”, or at least less-car-dependent, lifestyle that doesn’t seem to get mentioned by Walk Score, or in most other discussions of America’s transition from the Happy Motoring Uber Alles years. One reason we chose this particular town to buy a house where we hope to spend the rest of our lives is that it’s got a dependable 24-hour taxi service (and even a rather less dependable emergency-backup competing ‘public limo’ company). We’re at the back end of the Baby Boomer demographic, and if the local tv news is any indication, there are a lot of aging Americans who need to find an alternative to doing their own driving. In the perfect world James H. Kunstler envisions, we’d all be living within walking distance of everything we needed. In this world, there are limits to how well even the most dedicated New Semi-Urbanist can plan a life where family, occupation, recreation, shopping, and medical services are conveniently clustered. As more Americans get older (and peak oil gets more expensive), we’re going to need a lot more single-user work-arounds… jitneys, vanpools, and taxis. And hopefully more adaptable low-tech vehicles, like multi-axle ‘bicycles’ or assisted-power not-golf-carts. But I don’t see much discussion of the spectrum between “drive your personal SUV” and “find an apartment on a subway line”. Am I just not looking in the right places?

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49Comments

  1. 1.

    Yutsano

    August 24, 2010 at 1:19 am

    Before the other pedants jump on you:

    And there’s another piece of the “car-free”, or at least less-car-dependant

    Should be dependent.

    And one of the nice features of my new condo is its accessibility to a transit center. It’s literally a two minute drive there. So it doesn’t remove the car completely from the equation, but it is a rather nice perk.

  2. 2.

    sherifffruitfly

    August 24, 2010 at 1:22 am

    1) “dependent”.

    2) Walkscore is fairly old (in these-days terms), and while good, is only approximate.

  3. 3.

    jeffreyw

    August 24, 2010 at 1:34 am

    This is an item I think about as I get older. We live in a very rural area. Closest grocery is 12 miles away. There is nothing close enough to walk to other than a few neighbors. I can see a day coming when driving may not be an option. I’ve worked mostly construction all my life, the jobs were by definition temporary and where I lived wasn’t really a factor. One job would be an hour north, the next maybe 30 minutes south. There are great benefits to living where we do-privacy, plenty of room, wildlife to watch, and more. Downsides are many-drive everywhere, poor infrastructure including broadband and cell phone. We do have city water now, so we don’t complain too loudly.

  4. 4.

    jeffreyw

    August 24, 2010 at 1:39 am

    Plumb OT, but I’ve wanted something exactly like this for a long time and just got around to looking for it tonight. Doh! Comes in handy when you are at the end of a long thread and want to go back to the beginning.

  5. 5.

    Comrade Colette Collaboratrice

    August 24, 2010 at 1:52 am

    Eh, walkscore is really way too much at the mercy of how far lazy, fat (I speak only of averages) Americans are actually willing to walk. I do a lot of land use and transportation planning. Our standard algorithm says anything within 1/2 mile/15 minutes is “walkable,” and further assumes that an average human can walk that half-mile in less than 15 minutes. I live in a neighborhood in San Francisco that is painfully dull and featureless and lacks nearly everything your fevered San Francisco dreams attribute to our lovely metropolis, but has a walk score of 76. In fact, out on the street corner, I see my neighbors routinely waiting 20 minutes for a 10-minute bus ride to a destination that is only a 20-minute walk away. I should know: I make that same 20-minute walk every day. One of the reasons I do, despite the existence of a bus line that exactly parallels my walking route, is that the freakin’ bus don’t work worth a damn. All this anecdote-that-is-not-data is meant to reinforce your point that walk score (or any other metric) alone cannot convey the impediments to actually walking, or taking public transit, or any of the other ways of getting us out of our accursed cars. And yet, when City budgets shrink by 30% due to economic factors beyond Goldman Sachs’ our control, what gets cut from the municipal budget? The bus.

  6. 6.

    chrismealy

    August 24, 2010 at 1:59 am

    Make friends with the bike advocates — in the Netherlands bike infrastructure doubles as wheelchair infrastructure. Check it out.

    (This is another difference between “cycling for everyone” and “cycling for daredevil spandex types“)

  7. 7.

    asiangrrlMN

    August 24, 2010 at 2:08 am

    Hola, late-shift? What up?

    @jeffreyw: I see in a thread below that you have some competition in the pizza-cooking department from J.W. Hamner.

    @Yutsano: How you be hon? Thanks for being a pedant so I don’t have to be the heavy.

  8. 8.

    Yutsano

    August 24, 2010 at 2:14 am

    @asiangrrlMN: I was actually trying to be kind about it. I even got there first and it still got mentioned. Ah well what ya gonna do?

    I’m good, heading to Seattle tomorrow so not gonna be up too much later here.

  9. 9.

    Andy K

    August 24, 2010 at 2:14 am

    Oooooo, a Kunstler link- SWEET!

    Still my favorite TED Talk evah.

  10. 10.

    jeffreyw

    August 24, 2010 at 2:16 am

    @asiangrrlMN: Good evening, Ma’am. Mr Hammer does some good work with the tomatoes. The less said about the other pie the better, in the “if you can find nothing good to say…” class of genteel civil discourse.

  11. 11.

    asiangrrlMN

    August 24, 2010 at 2:20 am

    @jeffreyw: Bwahahahahahaha. I thought both looked good. What are you doing up so late?

    @Yutsano: You moved in yet?

  12. 12.

    Yutsano

    August 24, 2010 at 2:23 am

    @asiangrrlMN: Getting there, a load of shtuff goes over tomorrow with the furniture going this weekend if all goes well. My new computer modem should already be there, so I get to see exactly how packages work at the new place as I didn’t see a package box where the mailboxes were.

  13. 13.

    MikeJ

    August 24, 2010 at 2:23 am

    @jeffreyw: And that’s what I love about firefox. I know somewhere there is some asshole in a black turtleneck who will talk about unity of design and how there’s is one proper way to do things and how users are too stupid to understand why the UI isn’t always the same. And yet you had a problem, and now it is solved. Your computer is working for you, and it doesn’t matter who approves of it. That makes me very happy.

  14. 14.

    jeffreyw

    August 24, 2010 at 2:27 am

    @asiangrrlMN: I stayed up to make sure itunes was gonna download the podcasts from the Clarke’s World on-line magazine. I listen to audio podcasts while mowing, or otherwise occupied in tasks that don’t require reading or talking. Other fave podcast sources are Escape Pod, and Starship Sofa.
    Edit to add: Because the FY Hughes.net bastards give me a free window between 1 am my time and 6 am to download gigabytes and not have them count towards my bandwidth cap. The bastards. But I repeat myself. Grumble.

  15. 15.

    asiangrrlMN

    August 24, 2010 at 2:27 am

    @MikeJ: Darkrose is looking for the Chrome pie filter in Open Thread below (about Reid and Dean). I don’t know how to give a link, so maybe you can drop in?

    @Yutsano: Cool. Sounds like things are progressing nicely.

  16. 16.

    bago

    August 24, 2010 at 2:28 am

    Come to Seattle. I sold my car and have been biking/busing everywhere for the past year. With zipcar available for weird car trips…

    I can hop around town, fly to San Fran, DC, New York, and get around no problem. No parking problems, no getting stuck in traffic, and you shed a few pounds. The only downside is being incredibly paranoid of people opening their car doors into your path. Scary.

    When I’m riding I-90 and am beating the suckers in traffic, I feel a certain sort of glee.

    My primary limitation is that I can only rock 3-4 hours on my bluetooth headphones linked to my iphone. Gotta stop and recharge and some dining establishment.

  17. 17.

    jeffreyw

    August 24, 2010 at 2:32 am

    Oh, and while we are talking pizzas, I do have a body of work, ya know.

  18. 18.

    asiangrrlMN

    August 24, 2010 at 2:36 am

    @jeffreyw: Oh, I know. Believe me, I have lusted over your pizzas, Sir! And now, I want pizza. Damn you! #Shakes fist in your direction# Hey. Since you’re up. Do you think you could make a gluten-free, dairy-free pizza that still tasted like pizza?

  19. 19.

    Felanius Kootea (formerly Salt and freshly ground black people)

    August 24, 2010 at 2:40 am

    I can’t believe there are parts of Los Angeles that made the list. I guess I live in the wrong neighborhood.

    Anyone else catch Muslime Amanpour’s interview with Daisy Khan and Rabbi Joy Levitt? I’d recorded it on my DVR and just got around to watching it. Sounds like the project hasn’t yet raised one cent and the idea for the center was modeled on Jewish Community Centers/YMCAs. She asked Daisy whether Daisy should have done a better job of outreach. I kept seeing the Jon Stewart clip of Daisy on Fox News back in December with Laura Ingraham telling her “I like what you’re doing.” I don’t think any outreach she’d done would have prevented the Republicans from demagoguing this issue. I bet she thought the initial reception from the Fox crowd was good news.

  20. 20.

    Yutsano

    August 24, 2010 at 2:41 am

    @jeffreyw: Oh wise master, please teach me all your great knowledge.

  21. 21.

    jeffreyw

    August 24, 2010 at 2:41 am

    @asiangrrlMN:
    I’d have to do some research.

  22. 22.

    jeffreyw

    August 24, 2010 at 2:43 am

    @Yutsano: Hope you ain’t fishin for apple butter, ms grasshopper.

  23. 23.

    asiangrrlMN

    August 24, 2010 at 2:44 am

    @jeffreyw: Don’t kill yourself. I am just curious if it’s even possible. I have had delicious gluten-free other baked goods, but it’s DAMN hard to find a substitute for cheese.

    @jeffreyw: It’s SO FREAKING GOOD on the fake bagels I have. To. Die. For. (Fake meaning made of tapioca. Surprisingly yummy).

  24. 24.

    Yutsano

    August 24, 2010 at 2:48 am

    @asiangrrlMN: Tofu cheese sucks. And I do mean sucks. You’re right in there being no good sub for cheese. I’m just glad there are at least some things you can eat.

    @jeffreyw: Inasmuch as I lust for a great apple butter, I shan’t resort to such tactics.

  25. 25.

    jeffreyw

    August 24, 2010 at 2:48 am

    @asiangrrlMN: Here’s a recipe for the crust. http://glutenfreemommy.com/homemade-pizza/

  26. 26.

    asiangrrlMN

    August 24, 2010 at 2:52 am

    @jeffreyw: Yeah, I can find gluten-free pizzas–just not without cheese or with an acceptable substitute.

    @Yutsano: No kidding. There is one acceptable jalapeno soy cheez, but that’s it.

  27. 27.

    jeffreyw

    August 24, 2010 at 2:56 am

    @asiangrrlMN: Yup, cheese-less pizza is getting into oxymoron territory. So is pizza with fruit.

  28. 28.

    Yutsano

    August 24, 2010 at 3:02 am

    @asiangrrlMN: I went to college with a guy who was allergic to cheese. And I’m not talking like really uncomfortable allergy here. I’m talking like would kill him allergy. So any decent pizzeria will make a pizza without cheese if you request it. You just get creative with the flavorings besides putting cheese on.

  29. 29.

    Jebediah

    August 24, 2010 at 3:02 am

    got a 77 walkability score woo hoo!

  30. 30.

    asiangrrlMN

    August 24, 2010 at 3:08 am

    @jeffreyw: I have a friend who makes a cheese-less pizza that she insists is really good (she’s lactose-intolerant as well), but I am dubious. And, heh. I see you are a man who stands up for his principles. I like that.

  31. 31.

    asiangrrlMN

    August 24, 2010 at 3:21 am

    @Yutsano: Yeah, whatevs. If there’s no cheese, it’s not pizza.

  32. 32.

    Yutsano

    August 24, 2010 at 3:27 am

    @asiangrrlMN: I am of this opinion personally, however I am also lactose tolerant. In fact I have no food allergies at all. Just marijuana and cologne/perfume.

  33. 33.

    asiangrrlMN

    August 24, 2010 at 3:30 am

    @Yutsano: I iz allergic to all of the above ‘cept pot, which I don’t like. Also allergic to: pollen, alcohol, cats, dust, and housework.

  34. 34.

    jeffreyw

    August 24, 2010 at 3:35 am

    G’night, y’all. [yawns and totters of towards the bedroom]

    stumbles over dog in hallway…nothin dear, go back t’sleep…scritch scritch…oh fuck! is this thing still on? jeebus…{click}

  35. 35.

    asiangrrlMN

    August 24, 2010 at 3:36 am

    @jeffreyw: Heh. Good night. Sleep well.

  36. 36.

    Batocchio

    August 24, 2010 at 3:58 am

    88% walkability for me, and I do walk when it’s practical. Although in LA, for many jobs/commutes, a car is pretty necessary…

  37. 37.

    cleek

    August 24, 2010 at 7:17 am

    i get an “80”, despite the fact that there are no grocery stores, bars or restaurants within 1.5 miles of my house. there’s a Catholic elementary school and a dentist down the street, but that’s it.

    i have no idea what that thing is talking about.

  38. 38.

    DecidedFenceSitter

    August 24, 2010 at 7:33 am

    Mid 30’s for me, but I live in Suburbia hell that is Northern Virginia. (Actually, there’s a grocery store within a mile, but I still drive to much better grocery store a fivish miles away.)

    Unfortunately, all the walkable places are the high density – and having done apartment living, I know it’s draining to be basically living with your neighbor’s sounds. I like my nice fairly quiet cul-de-sac. I definitely could and should bike more, but still doesn’t work for groceries unless I get one of those carts to pull behind the bike.

  39. 39.

    The Raven

    August 24, 2010 at 7:35 am

    ‘But I don’t see much discussion of the spectrum between “drive your personal SUV” and “find an apartment on a subway line”. Am I just not looking in the right places?’

    No, you’re right. Transit planners and urban designers study this stuff, but there’s almost nothing in the popular literature. Honestly, I wouldn’t give Kunstler a lot of credit on these things; he wrote one interesting book, and then a string of dull, mean, and probably wrong ones. (For one thing, he forgets what poverty would be like in his Brave Old World.)

  40. 40.

    cleek

    August 24, 2010 at 7:42 am

    @asiangrrlMN:
    Chrome Pie

  41. 41.

    BR

    August 24, 2010 at 7:46 am

    @Andy K:

    This.

  42. 42.

    PurpleGirl

    August 24, 2010 at 8:14 am

    Argh! I went over to the Walkability website to get my neighborhood’s score and the score finding function gave me a different neighborhood and map. I live on Queens Boulevard at 60th St in Woodside, near Calvary Cemetery. Walkability gave me a map of the (upper) Ditmars area along the Grand Central Parkway near St. Michael’s Cemetery. I sent them an email explaining the error. I’ll see how they respond.

  43. 43.

    Stephen1947

    August 24, 2010 at 8:43 am

    I live in the Fenway in Boston – our Walk Score was 100 – the message was “congratulations on living in a walkers’ paradise.” But there are some flaws – they list the ‘walkable’ bookstore as the one associated with Berklee College of Music – which is fine if all you want is books about music… Fewer than 2 blocks from it, closer than the Victory Mosque is to the “hallowed Ground Zero,” is the Trident Bookstore, a much better general independent store.

  44. 44.

    shortstop

    August 24, 2010 at 9:06 am

    Bah. Walkscore counts tiny bodegas as groceries, McDonalds and Pizza Huts as restaurants, seriously specialized stores as general shopping and so forth. When it first came out I thought it was a good start. Unfortunately, it never got better.

  45. 45.

    PurpleGirl

    August 24, 2010 at 10:02 am

    I tried it again, this time taking our the hyphen in the building number… and it brought up the correct map. It’d interesting that it gave a bookstore as being within the Big Six Tower development, but I know of no bookstore. Could be a publishing enterprise of someone who lives in the development. I will have to investigate this.

  46. 46.

    Anniecat45

    August 24, 2010 at 11:25 am

    I don’t see much discussion of the spectrum between “drive your personal SUV” and “find an apartment on a subway line”. Am I just not looking in the right places?’

    No. No one is talking about this, even for the elderly. I am 54 and starting to consider if I want to move if I ever retire, and all the assessments and planning tools talk about is the price of a house and the level of state and local taxation. NONE of them talk about public transit.

    I too live in San Francisco (though I have 3 bus lines that are 2 blocks from my apartment) and it’s actually sounding more and more practical to stay where I am if I retire.

  47. 47.

    Luthe

    August 24, 2010 at 11:55 am

    As more Americans get older (and peak oil gets more expensive), we’re going to need a lot more single-user work-arounds… jitneys, vanpools, and taxis.

    This is what I refer to as “the para-transit problem.” It’s not something I’ve seen really addressed in planning literature, but then, I am a baby planner just beginning grad school. Perhaps my classes will talk about this later.

    Still, it is something I think about, because living in exburbia for ten years makes you really aware of how even if there is “transit” in your area (I use the term loosely), you still can’t get there from here without using a car. It was entirely possible for me to go into NYC on Metro-North, but to get there I had to drive the twenty miles to the train station. If I wanted to visit friends in the Philly suburbs, I could get as far as the SEPTA stop in their town, but there was no way I could get to their house without a car.

    The future of transit is not in hubs, it’s in getting from those hubs to individual destinations. TOD and New Urbanism are great in theory, but infrastructure is not like mushrooms, it doesn’t spring up overnight. Changing the current fabric of the suburbs is going to take a long time and meanwhile people are still going to need to get where they’re going. It’s not as easy as Peter Calthorpe and Andres Duany make it sound.

  48. 48.

    kideni

    August 24, 2010 at 12:15 pm

    My score is 75 (woo-hoo!), but you do get the impression they don’t always look into the things they identify as amenities. The bookstore they list is the no-longer extant Greek Orthodox icon shop (a few years ago, Walk Score would include the p&rn shop a half mile away as a bookstore too; I’m actually kind of sad they dropped it). The neighborhood is truly easy to manage without a car (we have a real grocery store two blocks away), so I think the score is fine. It just makes me wonder about their scoring in areas I’m not so intimately familiar with.

  49. 49.

    trollhattan

    August 24, 2010 at 12:59 pm

    Well, I score an “erm” at 69, but have to say that things have vastly improved since moving in back in the ’90s. The real challenge is being hemmed in by a 4-lane arterial to the west and a walled railyard to the east.

    But…we can walk to a two-year college, light rail station, coffee shop, restaurant with beer, a tattoo parlor (grumble), a Mexican burrito joint, a Salvadorian burrito and pupusa joint, a high school, a big park with attached golf course, tykes amusement park and zoo, and the city’s best bike shop.

    After fifteen years of car-commuting I’m finally working where I can take light rail and, having finally scored a bike locker, I can cycle to work. That last has its risks, since we’re a very car-centric city, but I’ve not taken light rail since May.

    I await my dreamed-of brewpub, then I can die happy.

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