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Perambulation Nation
“Good frickin’ lord, it’s too dang far to walk to the corner store to buy me a frozen yogurt,” you might moan. “I’ll just have to be a global warmer and gas up the SUV to drive there.” Not so, my friend! Not only is it good exercise, but it’s just well, great to perambulate. With this Walk Score, a nifty calculator, you can determine exactly how walkable your address is on a scale of zero to one hundred, with zero being you stranded in a car-only desert and one hundred being you having ascended to a pedestrian paradise. Taking into account factors like a main neighborhood centre, accessibility, parks, and public space, the nearness of schools and workplaces, speed controlled streets and pedestrian friendly design, Walk Score uses a whizbang algorithim to figure the feet friendliness of your ‘hood.
Although it doesn’t take into account aesthetics, safety, or public transit, the site rocks for providing an instant list of the nearest resources like grocery stores, libraries, coffee shops, and most importantly, the closest bar. An address just north of the Danforth at Pape scored a 65, but a central Yonge and Bloor-ish address scored a whopping 73! Load time for international and Canadian addresses can sometimes take forever and ever (and the calculator seems woefully misinformed about the presence of schools in areas) but according to the good citizens at Walkscore, they’re preparing their international code and hoping to beef up the Canadian support later this week.
Photo by moonwire from the Torontoist Flickr Pool. Thanks to Lifehacker for tipping us off to Walk Score.