Neat toy

[jan_andrea]

This is cool.

You put in your streeet address and zip code, and it queries Google Maps to figure out how "walkable" your house and neighborhood are.

Our address right now gets a 78 out of 100, which is absolutely true -- I can walk to a lot of useful places easily, including the school, library, post office, and several cafes and whatnot.

My dad's house gets a 0 out of 100. No surprise there; it's at least 1.5 miles to *anywhere* and those places are meh. Mom's gets a 0/100, too; their nearest thing (the school) is listed as 1.64 miles, and most places are 4+ miles away.

Our old house in Racine got a 40/100. Interesting that our address now is so much more walkable!

What about where you live? If it's walkable, do you?

Comments

[jpallan.livejournal.com]

I live in Cambridgeport, four blocks up Magazine Street from Trader Joe's, four blocks on Putnam Avenue to Whole Paycheck, and eight blocks from the amenities of Central Square. Everything is walkable, and when not walkable, public transportable. It calculates walkability of 75%, with interesting gaps. We are a mile's walk from a theater — either the Brattle or the Harvard Square cinema. It also downgrades us for distance from banks, bookshops, apothecaries, hardware stores, cafés, locals, and the like ... that is, things that by nature aren't in a residential neighborhood.

I think that while it's a helpful metric, it's more helpful in places where there isn't any city planning. :P