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GAIA Host Collective
Thanks for showing this!
I checked our house, and the walk score was 26, which is not walkable. I live in a suburb of Atlanta, not New York.
The reason we bought our house here is because it is on the edge of the University where my husband works. He walks to work every day, and my children walked when they took classes there. Many of our neighbors work on campus, and walk to work.
There is a bus stop on campus, so our house is walking distance of a bus stop. (This is rare in the Atlanta suburbs.) This was another reason we moved here. The map doesn't have that information.
There are other things the campus has, including eating places, concerts, a large library, and a book store, but the map doesn't include these. My impression is that it is looking only at commercial establishments.
I think the idea of the walkablilty score is a good one. My example shows that there are a few things that get left out. If you are looking at the neighborhood, you will probably want to combine a real-life look around with what the map tells you.
This program definitely has limitations and you identified a big gap - institutions. Obviously the typical college campus was designed around walking being the primary mode of transportation with everything from food to entertainment to visiting co-workers and friends very nearby or within close reach.
But just to play devil's advocate, for many institutions, you have to be a "member" of a community to have access to many of the offerings of an institution, which is where much of the Town v. Gown tension arises. This may not apply everywhere, but you get the point.
And now that you mention it, I wouldn't be surprised if America's reaction to peak oil would be to retreat into closed off or semi-exclusive institutional or religious/ethnic/class/trade communities.
Am I not a citizen, but a consumer? That's really how my Walk Score is geared. My result is quite funny, because I live in a small town (pop. 2,000) on the shore of a rather large lake. It didn't get that there are three Coffee Shop possibilities in my little town, and flagged a coffee shop across the lake (about 12.5 actual miles as the crow flies) with a real journey of 45 minutes by car! It missed the fact that we have a rather nice county park on the shoreline in town and that we have a public beach right at the end of my street. Bookstore? Does anybody go to a bookstore anymore? I suppose I would browse once in a while, but Amazon is my rural bookstore. Walk Score found one across the lake again. My local in-town hardware store wasn't listed and neither was my local pharmacy. Movie theater? Laughable. Fitness center? There's trails across my road which lead up to the National Forest. Why should I pay to sit on a friggin' machine as a consumer of health/lifestyle?
But my life is much more than shopping. Where' my nearest bus stop? How far am I from the Post Office?
it's not very accurate either. it placed a point for a store in lenexa Kansas only a few blocks from my house in olathe smack dab inside my subdivision.