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I haven't seen a thread discussing Walk Score in years so I thought it would be interesting to get an update on the rankings. Here are the top 25 most walkable cities according to Walk Score. Obviously, Walk Score isn't perfect, but it does provide a benchmark. I only provided the principal city in each metro area as the major city for that region, but I did include secondary cities like Oakland and St. Paul.
That is, how close are addresses (or blocks) in a city to various amenities? Does it take 5 minutes to get to a grocer on foot, or 20?
Similarly, how many amenities lie within a certain walking distance of an address or block? Can you reach just one dry cleaners within a quarter-mile (roughly 5-minute) walk, or five? Do the restaurants within a 10-minute walk number one, or 15? How many amenities total lie within that 5-minute radius?
It's agnostic as to built form or infrastructure. That last probably explains why a city like LA scores higher than I suspect many would think it should. Miami probably rates higher because of the density of activity in some districts or nodes (e.g., Brickell) relative to the bulk of the territory within its limits.
Roughly one-third of Philadelphia's land mass is developed in a more suburban fashion, with fewer amenities within walking distance of residences, and that drags its score down. Yes, the city core, adjacent neighborhoods to its north, west, south and northeast, most of the southern part of the city, and some outlying neighborhoods in the Northwest and Lower Northeast contain areas of high walkability by the Walk Score metric, but much of the Northeast, Southwest and Roxborough in the Northwest are quite car-dependent.
Proximity yes, walking distance or time no. At least not the last time I looked.
If a freeway or six-lane uncrossable stroad is in the way, it makes no difference.
We might be saying the same thing in general.
I think that has changed recently. Now roads impact the score I thought.
“Walk Score also measures pedestrian friendliness by analyzing population density and road metrics such as block length and intersection density. Data sources include Google, Factual, Great Schools, Open Street Map, the U.S. Census, Localeze, and places added by the Walk Score user community.“
Because cities vary dramatically in how much physical area they cover and what portions of the metropolitan area they cover, walk score for city vs city comparisons end up being nigh useless. This is similar to when people say Jacksonville is bigger or more populous a city than DC and Boston. Sure, that's true, but it's also kind of not.
Using a city walk score strictly on municipal legal boundaries is maybe ironic for something that's supposedly ranking attributes that are supposed to be quite fine-grained and on a human scale.
I think other things people have noticed about walk score is that:
- the methodology in terms of sources used seem to effectively short change Canadian cities perhaps due to different sources pulled for US and Canada; it seems to be even worse for Quebec
- some of the data pulled is unfortunately outdated such as neighborhood population counts being at least least several years old and not updated from the 2020 census (2021 for Canada), so it's unclear what the update cycle for the various sources are but it is clear that at least some of them can go quite a while before updates
- it used to go by sheer proximity as the crow flies though I think in somewhat later times it did some route-finding
- it doesn't take into account some elements of urban design though arguably did better when it seemed to have implemented route-finding which would have innately taken into account some of that
Overall, I like walkscore and the methodology and idea, but I think the lack of updating especially after being acquired by Redfin is disappointing. I'd like to do an open source project version of it and thus with parameters that one can tweak.
I also tried to do what I think is the first step in a better way of doing a ranking of cities in terms of walkscore to move away from the obvious issues of doing it by municipal borders. This was to try to go by contiguous clumps of high walkscore areas. The most straightforward attempt was to use a cut off of 90 for neighborhoods that walk score used and sum the population of those neighborhoods as cited in this topic and with the last one done in this post though I stopped updating it given that walk score did not seem to be moving towards updating their numbers anymore:
Quote:
Originally Posted by OyCrumbler
Adding Madison, WI's core because it's awesome, is on an isthmus, and punches well above its weight. It amazingly slots between DC's Arlington bloc and New Orlean's core.
I liked Oy's way (pun, get it, oy ve) of listing the neighborhood walk scores instead of an entire city. But even those can be hard to judge in some cases due to terrain (hills) in places like San Francisco and Pittsburgh.
Oh my God these scoring models are almost always such jokes. Miami placed above Philadelphia (and within .1 of DC) is beyond laughable. Further, I've visited and walked around Oakland a couple of times, and while it is pretty walkable, it is not above Philly.
Next.
Quote:
Originally Posted by MarketStEl
It's agnostic as to built form or infrastructure. That last probably explains why a city like LA scores higher than I suspect many would think it should. Miami probably rates higher because of the density of activity in some districts or nodes (e.g., Brickell) relative to the bulk of the territory within its limits.
Which is frankly an absurd thing to be "agnostic" towards in such a scoring model.
Oh my God these scoring models are almost always such jokes. Miami placed above Philadelphia (and within .1 of DC) is beyond laughable. Further, I've visited and walked around Oakland a couple of times, and while it is pretty walkable, it is not above Philly.
Next.
Which is frankly an absurd thing to be "agnostic" towards in such a scoring model.
If you read MDAllstar's followup, the algorithm does now take road infrastructure and how it affects pedestrian access into account.
I liked Oy's way (pun, get it, oy ve) of listing the neighborhood walk scores instead of an entire city. But even those can be hard to judge in some cases due to terrain (hills) in places like San Francisco and Pittsburgh.
My problem with this method is that it doesn't show how walkable a city is as a whole. You can have a neighborhood that's walkable but isn't the most dense population wise. And you can have neighborhoods that are extremely concentrated but the density drops off faster than other cities with less people living in their 90+ walkscore neighborhoods. Also a city might have way more neighborhoods with a walkscore of 80+ despite having less people in the 90+ neighborhoods.
Last edited by Kaszilla; 11-17-2023 at 06:55 AM..
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