Save your legs, social life with Walk Score

In the old days, to figure out if your house, apartment, or place of work was good for walking, you'd have to go scout it out, or ask someone who knew the area. These days we have services such as Walk Score, a mashup that helps calculate how "walkable" an address is based on the services that surround it. It works by tallying up the distances to the surrounding attractions, and pulls them together in an average, which it gives you in a handy scale of 1 to 100. The higher the score, the more walk-friendly the area is. Simple enough right?

The businesses or areas of interest are based on 11 different categories, including grocery stores, bars and restaurants, book stores, and gyms. Not included are lines of public transportation or public bathrooms--which, as we've found in the past--can be mapped.

As you can guess, this system is neat but not without its flaws, and the site owns up to it. Inaccuracies with Google Maps' API data and the lack of information about sidewalks, street width, and crosswalks can easily provide data that is simply incorrect. Some of our test searches in the San Francisco metropolitan area came up skewed, my favorite being an area in the Tenderloin, which is by all accounts very unfriendly for pedestrians and personal safety, yet scored rather highly. Maybe they should mash this thing up with the crime mapper as well.

Note: I was having some issues with a Javascript bug earlier using Firefox, although the site worked just fine in other big browsers.

[via DownloadSquad via Neatorama]

Parts of downtown San Francisco get great walking scores, although others can be inaccurate.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

[peterbutler]

Dude, the Tenderloin is so walkable

It might not be the safest place in the world, but you can walk to all the essential services.

[peterbutler]

Dude, the Tenderloin is so walkable

It might not be the safest place in the world, but you can walk to all the essential services.

[PromisedPlanet]

Shortcomings are BIG shortcomings

Without information about sidewalks (an admitted shortcoming), Walk Score should be called "Things Near By Score". It's useless to know that you have a lot of services, shops etc. nearby if you have to risk your life to get there.

And that's one of the biggest problems in the U.S. today - a simple lack of sidewalks. They should be considered an infrastructure item, and required everywhere. Then again, I feel the same way about public transportation. Rant ended.

[PromisedPlanet]

Shortcomings are BIG shortcomings

Without information about sidewalks (an admitted shortcoming), Walk Score should be called "Things Near By Score". It's useless to know that you have a lot of services, shops etc. nearby if you have to risk your life to get there.

And that's one of the biggest problems in the U.S. today - a simple lack of sidewalks. They should be considered an infrastructure item, and required everywhere. Then again, I feel the same way about public transportation. Rant ended.