An Urban Property Website “Must Have”
With gas approaching $4 a gallon (just in time for Spring and Summer driving season no less), every urban property website needs to have their “Walk Score” on their website. It’s really simple to add to your site; your webmaster can do it for you easily. It shows how close neighborhood amenities are and scores you based upon those amenities. The higher the Walkscore, the more walkable your property is. Visit www.WalkScore.com to find out more.
February 28th, 2008 at 9:42 am
This is neat, but at the same time somewhat misleading. On the one hand, I like seeing a visual representation of the stores/restaurants/etc around my community. However, it isn’t truly a “walk score” if it doesn’t take into account temperature and weather patterns overall. For example, I live in Houston and 9 months out of the year, it’s pretty much too hot to walk anywhere, unless you happen to live in a mixed-use development, which are very rare here. It would be more valuable if the walkability score was adjusted based on the number of days per year that weather permitted reasonable walking.
Lastly, I wonder how they are pulling in store/restaurant information because many are missing. This could result in much lower scores for communities that are in areas with lower adoption rates to their database.
(Quick note: After I looked a bit through their site, I was more impressed as it showed reasons why the “score” doesn’t always work, including weather! http://www.walkscore.com/how-it-doesnt-work.shtml)
February 28th, 2008 at 12:24 pm
I agree that the concept is very interesting, but I’ve found the website to be a bit misleading in many cases.
It does a good job of calculating proximity to local restaurants, retailers and other services, but it doesn’t take into account things like having to cross 6 lanes of traffic to get there. I get the feeling that a lot of the scores would be very different if this site were administered by the ULI.
It’s still a neat tool, though.
February 29th, 2008 at 10:51 am
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