by Jonathan Hiskes. I love the simplicity of Walk Score , the tool that calculates how walkable a neighborhood is and ranks it on a 100-point scale. For example, Washington Square in Manhattan gets a rare 100 , while the rural town of Washington, Conn., gets an 18 . And I love how transparent Walk Score creator Mike Mathieu & Co. are about the site’s limits. It draws primarily from Google Maps data, and from the site’s How It Doesn’t Work page, we learn that it doesn’t account for lots of things that affect walkability, like street width, block length, the presence of sidewalks, freeways, hills, or even waterways. “If you live across the lake from a destination, we are assuming you will swim,” the site discloses. Those are big drawbacks if you live in downtown Baltimore or anywhere else where water separates neighborhoods. So it’s good to hear that improvements are in the works : We’re excited to share a sneak peek at the work we’re doing to address one of our top customer requests: using walking distances rather than crow-flies distances when calculating a Walk Score. “Street Smart” Walk Score Here’s an example of a house located across a freeway from a shopping mall.

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