You can check out the “Walking score” of your current home or somewhere you are looking to move at Walk Score a Google Maps mashup which locates your address then the distance to common points of interest such as grocery stores, coffee shops and even bars.For example I used my boyhood home in Port Huron which is located in Michigan’s thumb at the mouth of the St. Clair River where it meets Lake Huron. Your may have been though Port Huron not even knowing it by use of the Blue Water Bridge during travel to or from Canada.
One thing I noticed right away is that the mileage listed is as the crow flies not via a Google location to location route. Which makes sense because your walking not driving but because of this approach it can give inaccurate walking distances. In the picture above it lists the Port Huron Township park as being 0.5 miles from my home, but in reality is much further because their is no way to cross the river “Black River” with out walking WAY around. This even goes with out saying that many of the roads in the area are not well equipped for pedestrian traffic. A quick example of the mileage inaccuracy is my old home to Port Huron Hospital, listed on walkscore as 1.27m but a quick Google Maps point to point search comes in at 1.7m and the route is pretty much the optimum walking route.
While there are many conceptual problems wrong with the site, I feel it’s heart is in the right place. Walk Score was quick to show me that many places I THINK are far away are MUCH closer then my lazy mind would like them to be. It is also a great tool to learn what great business (hopefully locally owned) are around your home. I would love to see this site be bought out by Yelp and be integrated into their features. I will definitely be bookmarking this site to use next time I go on vacation. This is a great tool to find all the closes necessities in one quick search.
Walk Score via KevinHasABlog via Digg
License
This work is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.
Weird Darren Says:
July 28th, 2007 at 2:25 amVisit Weird Darren
Josh,
just posting to say hi, and to let you know that you are mentioned in the weekly blogger round up I do over at http://www.theoutdoorsstation.co.uk/html/bloggers.html
And to say you maybe interested in popping over to http://outdoorbloggers.com , which is an outdoors blogger forum.
Weird Darren
American Bushman Says:
August 31st, 2007 at 12:04 pmVisit American Bushman
Ouch. 22 of 100 for me.
Funny thing is I do quite a bit of walking–just not to the places listed on the site.
B
Julie Says:
January 2nd, 2008 at 9:20 amVisit Julie
Hey Josh.
My house got a decent Walk Score. We really do have a lot of stuff less than a mile away. And sidewalks almost everywhere.
But I looked at the businesses listed and said, “What? There’s a movie theater that close? Cool!” Then I checked out the map and realized it was referring to our friendly neighborhood porn shop. Oh well.
Julie