Walk Score is a neat application that shows how “walkable” your neighborhood is. Plug in an address, and it computes a score based on the proximity of grocery stores, restaurants, libraries, etc. So you can choose a place to live where you can maximize walking and minimize driving.
Our house in Ferndale didn’t do so well, but i’m happy to report that Logos‘ office in walkable downtown Bellingham scores a perfect walk score of 100! So you might want to think about working for Logos and getting rid of your car…
(Hat tip to Joel on Software)
Pretty cool site. I was surprised. The location of the house we bought was “not walkable” since that is one of the main reasons we bought it! My “what would really be cool” comment after messing with the walk score is… It would really be cool if you could personalize it…in my case, I don’t care how close schools are, or clothing and music stores are…so don’t count those…instead have the user create a list of the top X places they want to be able to walk too, so for me a close grocery store and hardware store would probably be #1 and 2.. Also, if I could score distances, because what is to far to walk for one person, may be nothing to me, so anything under 1/2 mile is a perfect score, anything less than a mile is 80% and so on. Last, certain things didn’t seem to count at all, the Little Miami River, about 150 yards away, the walking/bike path that goes for tens of miles along it etc. don’t show up as “parks”. I’ll see how it progresses, sort of reminds me of zillow.com jeffl
Right, there’s a whole page on how it doesn’t work (e.g. what’s wrong with it).
Since it’s described as “a patent-pending algorithm”, i wouldn’t be surprised to see some more commercial spin-offs from this, and the kind of personalization you mention seems like a strong candidate for additional features.