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August 9, 2007

| They Should Probably Just Call it Coruscant >>

Walkability Throwdown

C’mon Snarkmatrix — whatcha got? Can your neighborhood’s walk score beat Cole Valley’s astonishing 97?

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Posted August 9, 2007 at 4:12 | Comments (15) | Permasnark
File under: Briefly Noted, Gleeful Miscellany

Comments

My current digs rate a 94, but I plugged in an address in Center City Philadelphia (18th and Delancey) and scored a cool 100.

My 'hood scores 91. But what about the bikeability index?

My neighborhood got a 66, which, as a mid-Michigan city, was better than I expected. (My last apartment in the area scored a 46.) The New Community co-op, however? 88.

I dare someone to get lower than me - my pad in hollywood gets a TWELVE.

Kensington, Brooklyn, scores a 75, which might as well be 15 if you live in New York City. This would be exactly why I'm moving to a more hopping part of the BK in October.

Um, yeah, Cole Valley looks cute. But my neighborhood's solid 98 kinda speaks for the virtues of Minneapolis. If only a major media organization were to take up digs next door, I'd never look at a wheel again.

My sympathies to conor. My current apartment gets a 91, which is pretty damn amazing for Los Angeles.

Posted by: Laura on August 9, 2007 at 11:00 PM

The Lost Temple, which currently resides just west of Waikiki, rocks a pleasant 91. I feel this score, however, should be lower, as it fails the take into account the murderous disregard for traffic laws possessed by drivers in Honolulu.

My newish place on Main Street in the 'Nati scores a 92, which is a little misleading... e.g., "Mercy Housing Laundromat" is listed under "grocery stores" and the offices of the Cincinnati Arts Administration are counted as a movie theatre.

But the theatre where I'll be resident designer this year scores a fairly legit 97, and it's just a few blocks away from my place.

My hood hits 89, which is surprisingly low considering I rarely have to leave the surrounding 10 blocks for anything. But like Brandon says, anything under 95 should probably be considered a weak score in NYC.

The intersection near my house scores a cool 8. Of course, it's a brand new subdivision with limited commercial development thus far.

(I love how it's all relative. "90? Yeah, maybe that's a good score in Texas, but in Brooklyn we're looking for 95 and ABOVE, pal.")

I got a 91 in downtown Sacramento -- but it doesn't seem to account for the fact that it's also only a 10-block walk to my job. I bet distance-from-work would change all these scores ...

At least as far as I can tell, they also don't measure distance to transit. My friend's house in West Philadelphia and my parents' house in the Detroit suburbs might both be a quarter-mile from a neighborhood commercial corridor, but if there's a bus, trolley, and train connecting one to the city center but not the other, they hardly have the same functional walkability.

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