There's a lot of buzz over Walk Score, the site that rates neighborhood walkability. Using a Google-sitic algorithm, it first tallies the restaurants, coffee shops and other destinations near a given address and then gives them a numerical weight based on their distance from the address. Neighborhoods with interior retail tend to score high; neighborhoods without interior retail tend to score low.
Walk Score has been around a while, but it has gotten a lot of publicity recently over its "most walkable cities" list. (As Forbes, Men's Health, and Maxim have shown, you can't go wrong with a "top American cities" list.) Austin ranked a mediocre 29th among the 40 largest American cities. Cue anguished nail-biting.
While I agree that Austin is not very walkable, I don't think Walk Score provides a meaningful metric. Take its ranking of Austin's neighborhoods. Downtown and West Campus, not surprisingly, get the top scores, and both are quite walkable. But a neighborhood's Walk Score doesn't really tell you anything about whether the neighborhood is a decent place to walk because it doesn't account for sidewalks, shade, or traffic. Ignoring a neighborhood's urban form can yield some funny ratings.
For example, Walk Score's map of Austin paints the neighborhoods along Research Boulevard a walkable green:
I'm pretty sure no one's walking to the restaurants and strip malls on the 183 frontage roads.
My neighborhood (South Lamar) scores a "somewhat walkable" 61, which sounds low for an older neighborhood just a couple miles from downtown. But it's really too high. None of my neighborhood's three main interior streets -- Clawson, Del Curto, or Thornton -- has a sidewalk. Even if you make it to South Lamar, there is precious little on our side of the street -- and God help you if you want to cross the street. Unless you're walking to Taco Xpress, Walgreen's or the bus stop, you've got slim pickings.
The best advice is probably on the site's FAQ's:
You should use the Web 3.0 app called "going outside and investigating the world for yourself" before deciding whether a neighborhood is walkable!
