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Walk Scoring Your 'Hood: Seattle

Posted by Eric de Place

06/12/2008 09:20 AM

Finding the walk stars in 77 neighborhoods.

walk score prev Our friends at Walk Score are out with a ranking of Seattle's neighborhoods. It's good stuff, and Jennifer Langston has a great article about it in the P-I. There's also a nice segment on King 5 news and a good piece in the Times.

So which areas do best? Unsurprisingly, it's the nexus of Pioneer Square, downtown, First Hill, Belltown, the International District, and South Lake Union. But there are a couple of surprises as well: How did Roosevelt end up in the #5 position? And why is Capitol Hill down there at #11?

Part of the answer has to do with how you define a neighborhood. For instance, Roosevelt proper is a relatively small area around the commercial center, while Capitol Hill includes a large swath of land, some of which is fairly low-density and residential. (Check out the "Walk Score Distribution" in the upper right hand corner for a graphic illustration of what's going on.)

You could quibble, of course, about which places are most pleasant to walk -- Capitol Hill is a gem on that score -- but still, the proximity calculations that underlie Walk Score are a very good indication of where it's possible to live a car-lite lifestyle. And nailing down some hard numbers and thoughtful methodology can go a long way toward illustrating comparisons -- comparisons that are already beginning to inform real estate decisions and that may soon inform public policy.

Walk Score will soon produce similar rankings for the biggest 40 cities in the US. Stay tuned!

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Comments

Posted by allisonlindsay 06/12/2008 12:26 PM

A great tool, for sure. I blogged it recently at Living Small; lots of commenters were pleased to find that they lived within walking distance of all sorts of businesses, some of which were new discoveries.

I'm optimistic that, as you suggested, this type of data is influencing our city's home buyers. Walkability was huge on my list when I went house hunting in early 2007; hopefully that priority is growing in others' minds as well.

Thanks for covering this topic, Eric.

Posted by Mishel 06/13/2008 07:54 AM

I believe that walk score is cool, but nowadays more and more people drive cars. Homes are often located in an area where some stablishments are easier to get to by car than on foot. I’ve recently found a type of service on Fizber. It is called Drive Score.It shows a map of what establishments are in your neighborhood and calculates a Drive Score based on the number of places within a convenient driving distance.

Posted by Nike 06/16/2008 07:52 AM

Yes, walk score is real a good idea! But why only walk score?How often do we walk nowadays? More and more people drive cars.I have also tried one more service at DriveScore. It is called Drive Score.With the help of it you can see how close establishments are by car. Try! It's really a perfect idea!