Walk Score gets to expand due to funding from the Rockefeller Foundation

Big news for the WalkScore people. They've received funding from the Rockafeller foundation, plan to make enhancements to the Walk Score system, and are starting an open source software project based on the walkscore software. This is all excellent news.

The enhancements include adding public transit, transportation cost, and greenhouse gas emission data to Walk Score. Or as they say in pressreleasese:

As part of the grant, the Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT) will provide Front Seat (the developers behind WalkScore) with the estimated transportation costs of a location as well as the household greenhouse gas emissions from transportation. “As people look for a place to live, we want to make it easy for them to factor transportation impacts into their buying decisions,” said Matt Lerner, CTO of Front Seat.

If this pans out they promise the result will be that WalkScore displays include

• You’ll see public transit stops on the Walk Score map
• Public transit accessibility will be factored into your Walk Score
• You’ll see your predicted transportation cost and greenhouse gas emissions provided by The Center for Neighborhood Technology

The open source software project side of this will be hosted at http://walkscore.org (note .org rather than the .com which hosts the commercial service). At the moment the content of that site is a signup form and a promise of more to come. Having been through the open sourcing of a pile of commercial software I can attest that this is not a simple process. One must evaluate every bit of the software to determine whether you have rights to place it under an open source license among other considerations. Further it represents a change in business model. Until now Front Seat, the developers of Walk Score, have been earning their income through providing Walk Score services to real estate agencies. But by putting their source code in the hands of the public it's possible someone else could develop the same service and threaten their income stream. It will be interesting to see how this plays out for them.

The WalkScore is a measure of how walkable a neighborhood is. They have developed a set of measures with which to gauge how attractive it is to walk around a given neighborhood. These are based on the number of "attractions" in a given neighborhood and the presence of walkways to those attractions. More information is on their website at http://walkscore.com

About Front Seat and Walk Score

Walk Score is a project of Front Seat (www.frontseat.org), a civic software company based in Seattle. Since its launch in July 2007, Walk Score has become the most popular worldwide measure of walkability. Over 700 real estate websites show Walk Score on their listings and over 2.5 million scores are distributed to partners each day. The Walk Score team is advised by a tenperson Advisory Board, which includes urban planning, environmental and technical experts.

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Press Release

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Front Seat Awarded Rockefeller Grant

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Walkability and walkable cities

Walkability and walkable cities

I've recently been walking a lot. I have a city bus line that passes directly in front of my house, another one a half block away, and yet another one a couple blocks away. The buses have good connections to other bus and train lines and it's real convenient to walk over to the bus, take the bus, and walk around. It occurred to me while walking to ponder what makes a city walkable or not, and what can be done to advocate for cities to be more walkable.

A walkable city encourages positive changes like less pollution, and healthier people. Unfortunately the U.S. cities I'm familiar with have layout and construction that interfere with walkability. And, hey, looking around me I see a lot of people who drive everywhere and think that walking a mile is an impossibly long distance. I believe a large part of why a 1 mile walk is thought impossibly long is due to unwalkability.

For example roads (especially high traffic roads) cut neighborhoods and presents a walkability barrier. A pedestrian having to cross a high traffic road is in a risk from the traffic (at worst) or simply delayed waiting to cross the road, and while it's not insurmountable it is a barrier that degrades the walking experience.

While I was wondering I had a great brainstorming of a website which would crowdsource a walkability score. It would utilize a mapping service (like Google Maps) and ask people to put in walkability observations. Perhaps the collected data could be used to lobby governments for increased walkability.

Fortunately this exact service already exists. Whew, I don't have to implement it. Walk Score is this service. "We help you find a walkable place to live by calculating a Walk Score for any address."

Back to the Future: Walkable Urbanism gives an interesting explanation of how walkability used to be how our cities were organized, and it was the car based transportation in suburbia that made cities unwalkable.

Walkable Neighborhoods goes over their picture of what makes a place walkable. They have an interesting side by side comparison of the feasible walking radius for a one-mile walk based on different city designs. A city designed in a grid pattern is more walkable than the modern suburban design involving lots of quiet culdesacs.

Complete the Streets is an advocacy website meant to encourage that are designed and operated to enable safe access for all users. Pedestrians, bicyclists, motorists and bus riders of all ages and abilities are able to safely move along and across a complete street. HOW TO GET TO COMPLETE STREETS is an overview of the process.

What's Walkable? is research and ideas on walkable neighborhoods.

Why Walk? The Benefits of Walkable Neighborhoods ... Walkable Communities are Climate-Friendly ... Walkable Neighborhoods Promote Safety ... Walkable Neighborhoods Give You Time Back! ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedestrian-friendly - In urban design, walkability is the measure of the overall walking conditions in an area. The definition for walkability is: "The extent to which the built environment is friendly to the presence of people living, shopping, visiting, enjoying or spending time in an area". Factors affecting walkability include, but are not limited to: land use mix; street connectivity; residential density (residential units per area of residential use); "transparency" which includes amount of glass in windows and doors, as well as orientation and proximity of homes and buildings to watch over the street; plenty of places to go to near the majority of homes; placemaking, street designs that work for people, not just cars and retail floor area ratio. Major infrastructural factors include access to mass transit, presence and quality walkways, buffers to moving traffic (planter strips, on-street parking or bike lanes) and pedestrian crossings, aesthetics, nearby local destinations, air quality, shade or sun in appropriate seasons, street furniture, traffic volume and speed. and wind conditions. One of the best ways to quickly determine how walkable a block, corridor or neighborhood is is to count the number of people walking, lingering and enjoying a space. The diversity of people, and especially the presence of children, seniors and people with disabilities, denotes the quality, competeness and wholesomeness of a walkable space.

walkinginfo.org is another advocacy site aiming to improve walkability. It has information covering the basics and solutions of implementing walkability improvements.

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Walk Score

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Complete the Streets

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What's Walkable?

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Why Walk? The Benefits of Walkable Neighborhoods

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedestrian-friendly

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http://www.walkinginfo.org/index.cfm

External Media