What?s Your Walk Score?

Ideally, Walk Score would track infrastructural and environmental issues: Does a street have good (or any) sidewalks? How long do you have to wait for the light? What?s the traffic volume? How many pedestrians have been struck in the crosswalk by turning cars? What?s the street level temperature? The company would also do well to recognize that proximity does not always equal walkability. Scott Bricker, the director of America Walks, says, ?If you do a Walk Score search on Beaverton Transit Center, in suburban Portland, it has a Walk Score of 96, off the charts,? he says. ?If you look at a Google Map, you see you can?t walk anywhere. It?s all strip mall stuff, five lane streets.? Indeed, Walk Score (guided by an advisory board) has been trying to refine its metric, and an ongoing beta service, called ?Street Smart Walk Score,? factors in actual walking routes, including an amoeba-like ?zone? of everything that can be walked to in 15 minutes. It also features variables like shorter block lengths and frequency of intersections?two factors urbanists associate with more walkable places. But here, too, data is lacking. ?There isn?t a good national dataset of crosswalks,? Hersh says.

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