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Borders make it wierd, since a supermarket in one neighborhood doesn’t count towards the other even if it’s easily walkable.
But overall I think Chicago and Philly are #2 and #3 citywide Simply because of a more cohesive geographic areas.
Like East Boston, Chelsea and Central Boston are all walkable but are very fragmented from each other due to water.
Same with SF and Oakland..
I believe the methodology does allow for supermarkets across the border of a neighborhood to count as an amenity for a resident of another neighborhood and the scores are more like an average of the point of view of sorts of all the area of a neighborhood. So if a supermarket is just across the western border of a neighborhood, then it exerts greater "influence" on the western than the eastern side of the neighborhood and its overall effect is factored roughly proportionally so.
I think SF and Oakland in terms of walkscore are really kind of different entities if we're limiting to walking and especially if we're doing some kind of thresholding on the score. For SF, the 80 cut-off actually takes in the urban part of neighboring Daly City while Oakland's most urban neighborhoods form a bloc with Berkeley neighborhoods. If someone wants to take a deep dive, I would be interested in where the 90 cut-off leaves Boston with Cambridge and Somerville core versus Chicago's, SF's, the East Bay's, Northern NJ's, DC's (should crossing the Potomac count?), Vancouver's and Toronto's.
I took a quick look at Montreal's and it strikes me as horribly off compared to Anglo-American cities even if accounting for the rather large neighborhood agglomerations and which makes me wonder if there's some kind of difference in the source of listings and how things are compiled in English.
Last edited by OyCrumbler; 08-21-2021 at 07:05 PM..
I really used to like Walkscore, but have found that they have really stopped caring about scores in favor of advertising apartments. I've been following some specific places on walkscore: places that have had significant changes in recent years that should have influenced walkscores. Well, they didn't. I submitted new places to walkscore, and nadda, nothing, no changes.
I really used to like Walkscore, but have found that they have really stopped caring about scores in favor of advertising apartments. I've been following some specific places on walkscore: places that have had significant changes in recent years that should have influenced walkscores. Well, they didn't. I submitted new places to walkscore, and nadda, nothing, no changes.
I was wondering how updated it was. I could see that populations in fast growing neighborhoods like DTLA hadn't been updated so I wasn't sure how often amenities were refreshed.
I really used to like Walkscore, but have found that they have really stopped caring about scores in favor of advertising apartments. I've been following some specific places on walkscore: places that have had significant changes in recent years that should have influenced walkscores. Well, they didn't. I submitted new places to walkscore, and nadda, nothing, no changes.
Quote:
Originally Posted by 2Easy
I was wondering how updated it was. I could see that populations in fast growing neighborhoods like DTLA hadn't been updated so I wasn't sure how often amenities were refreshed.
They mention using multiple data sources and so I think at least some of them are automatically scraped from sites (like Google and its map data) so it should be relatively easy for them to update as long as the sources they rely on update. Are there alternatives that do something similar?
I think one large issue for doing comparisons on this level are neighborhood definitions and what places even get assigned an area walkscore. For example, as of right now, Raleigh, NC has a top neighborhood score of 66 for College Park, but if you look at the heat map for the city, there's obviously a downtown Raleigh section that is very green and thus likely very walkable so it is likely taking in the sort of amenities and service listings from third party sources correctly. However, downtown Raleigh was never classified as a neighborhood by their system and therefore has no entry. This is somewhat rare among major cities, so that's not too bad though it's odd that Raleigh would be left out. Where it also gets weird in the context of this topic is that some of the small municipalities that are urban and bustling next to larger municipalities also don't get scores.
Last edited by OyCrumbler; 08-21-2021 at 08:26 PM..
Chicago and San Francisco because they're very centralized and everything at 90 or above is in one municipality so it's relatively easy compared to trying for something ridiculous like Boston. I believe the neighborhood for these are contiguous, but let me know if you spot something off. Chicago's population number at 9 or above is higher, but there are far fewer neighborhoods than SF and that's partially because neighborhood boundaries in Chicago tend to be much larger.
Compiling them and listing in order, but not listing NYC after 100 because it's a mess with how many entries it is and there isn't much of a comparison.
Largest contiguous at 100
New York City - Little Italy - Bowery - Chinatown - NoLita - Noho - West Village - Soho - 89,397
It'd be interesting to do an East Bay compilation with Oakland and Berkeley as well as a northern NJ one. I'm not sure what else Chicagoland has with scores in the 90s outside the core.
Might do this for the others at some point--I'd expect NYC to still be well ahead on this and LA to jump ahead of SF and maybe Chicago because many of LA's 90 blocs are fairly close to each other and linked by neighborhoods in their 80s.
Last edited by OyCrumbler; 08-22-2021 at 12:09 AM..
I took a quick look at Montreal's and it strikes me as horribly off compared to Anglo-American cities even if accounting for the rather large neighborhood agglomerations and which makes me wonder if there's some kind of difference in the source of listings and how things are compiled in English.
I’ve been saying this for some time now… Montreal’s numbers make absolutely no sense, as it EASILY has some of the most walkable neighborhoods in NA. And it stretches for miles and miles. There’s a reason why it has some of the highest transit ridership in NA, despite its modest population. Streets all over are filled with pedestrians.
Okay, so I was looking at the map of the area at the Oakland-Berkeley border and the score for the neighborhoods is 89 but when you click on College or Telegraph Aves, along that route, the score is 90+ all the way from the UC Campus all the way to Downtown Oakand so....
Anyhow, you dont have to use this data but I needed to know. LOL.
I’ve been saying this for some time now… Montreal’s numbers make absolutely no sense, as it EASILY has some of the most walkable neighborhoods in NA. And it stretches for miles and miles. There’s a reason why it has some of the highest transit ridership in NA, despite its modest population. Streets all over are filled with pedestrians.
I agree that there are probably things in walkscore that are geared towards the US and English-speaking people in particular and that likely influences the outcome like how exhaustively and accurately listed stores and services are from the sources they draw from. Montreal does have a decently high score though aggregated into pretty massive divisions, but it definitely seems like it should be notably higher.
Quote:
Originally Posted by 18Montclair
Okay, so I was looking at the map of the area at the Oakland-Berkeley border and the score for the neighborhoods is 89 but when you click on College or Telegraph Aves, along that route, the score is 90+ all the way from the UC Campus all the way to Downtown Oakand so....
Anyhow, you dont have to use this data but I needed to know. LOL.
There are other smaller clusters within Oakland...
Yea! I saw the same thing with Los Angeles as well where there were neighborhoods just on the cusp that would have connected the larger 90+ segments. I just took a look at South Berkeley after seeing your post and it's like one well-placed bodega and bar in the northwestern part of the neighborhood away from getting a 90.
The continuous urban walking experience in Seattle is like this. There are hills, bodies of water, and single family neighborhoods that make it less continuous. You could be walking for quite awhile though, all across the city and it would be urban and densely populated if you take the right routes. Sometimes it would be a more narrow connection, like some kind of avenue with midrises and shops (Rainier ave, 23rd, Madison, 45th etc). Other times it would be an expansive district (U district, Ballard, Capitol Hill etc)
There are also dense districts that are not attached by the continuous urban fabric ( Alki, Alaska Junction, Greenwood, Northgate, Georgetown, Lake City etc).
The continuous urban walking experience in Seattle is like this. There are hills, bodies of water, and single family neighborhoods that make it less continuous. You could be walking for quite awhile though, all across the city and it would be urban and densely populated if you take the right routes. Sometimes it would be a more narrow connection, like some kind of avenue with midrises and shops (Rainier ave, 23rd, Madison, 45th etc). Other times it would be an expansive district (U district, Ballard, Capitol Hill etc)
There are also dense districts that are not attached by the continuous urban fabric ( Alki, Alaska Junction, Greenwood, Northgate, Georgetown, Lake City etc).
South
Central
North
Entire
That resembles Los Angeles in a lot of ways with dense development along certain corridors. If you look at a walkscore heatmap of Seattle, the parts you outline seem to mostly follow the darker green parts of the heatmap.
Are some of the dense districts outside of the larger core abutting each other? Is there a corridor where development seems likely to link more of these?
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but when you click on College or Telegraph Aves, along that route, the score is 90+ all the way from the UC Campus all the way to Downtown Oakand so....
