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Interactive site: is your neighborhood walkable?
Walk Score
Walk Score helps people find walkable places to live. Walk Score calculates the walkability of an address by locating nearby stores, restaurants, schools, parks, etc.
Why Walking Matters
Walkable Neighborhoods
How It Works
How It Doesn’t Work: Known Issues with Walk Score:
We’ll be the first to admit that Walk Score is just an approximation of walkability. There are a number of factors that contribute to walkability that are not part of our algorithm… As MarlonBain said, “You should use the Web 3.0 app called going outside and investigating the world for yourself” before deciding whether a neighborhood is walkable!
(26 July 2007)
Dave Roberts writes at Gristmill:
Check out Walk Score, where you can plug in your address and find out how walkable your home is, on a scale of one to 100.
My old place — a condo near the heart of Ballard in Seattle — scored a 94. My new place, a house north of Seattle, just south of Shoreline, gets a 66.
BA:
A brilliant site: interactive, simple, helpful. Our condo scores at 85 – about right, I’d say. A helpful side effect of the site is that it lists your local stores, libraries, parks, schools, etc.
Life in the Faster Lane
How London Car Curbs Inspired U.S. Cities
Aaron O. Patrick, Wall Street Journal
…London Mayor Ken Livingstone introduced the fee in 2003 to relieve the city’s traffic jams, and expanded the zone in February. Since its introduction, the congestion charge has reduced traffic, prompted people to use public transportation and cut pollution.
Now, a number of U.S. cities including Dallas, Miami, Minneapolis-St. Paul and San Diego are considering congestion charges on busy roads or highways. San Francisco is discussing a congestion charge for its downtown, one of the busiest traffic zones in the country. Officials from the San Francisco County Transportation Authority have been to London numerous times to study its scheme, says Tilly Chang, the authority’s deputy director of planning.
London’s plan was also the model for New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s proposed $8 fee for cars south of 86th Street in Manhattan between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. Yesterday, the city reached an agreement with state legislators to create a committee to conduct hearings and study how to implement the plan, along with any other anti-congestion proposals, and will need final sign-off from the state legislature early next year. The project is dependent on receiving at least $200 million in federal funds, although the city hopes to get $500 million. Mr. Bloomberg said in a statement the city would “begin immediately to prepare for the installation of needed equipment to make our traffic plan a reality.”
Several other international cities have introduced similar schemes, though none have been on London’s scale.
(20 July 2007)
Transport policy needs to go off-road
Elliot Fishman, The Age
Victoria’s focus on widening freeways is a long- term recipe for disaster.
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“BE CAREFUL what you wish for” is the warning to the Victorian Government following its $8.6 billion transport wish list presented to the Federal Government recently.
The list includes $2.2 billion to add an extra lane in each direction to the Western Ring Road, a short-sighted policy that puts Victorians in a position of significant vulnerability – economically, environmentally and socially. Cities cannot achieve sustainable reductions in traffic congestion through road building.
The Victorian Government’s response is the classic error of attacking symptoms and ignoring causes, highlighted by Jane Jacobs in the urban planning classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities. It sees the problem as traffic congestion, the solution to widen the roads. But congestion is the symptom, car dependence the problem.
Cars account for about 85 per cent of trips in Melbourne – among the highest rate in the world – and this dependence holds the key to solving Melbourne’s transport problems. The Government’s response is akin to a doctor prescribing a larger belt for an obese patient, and leaves Victoria ill-equipped to deal with four urgent issues.
- Climate change…
- Oil shortages…
- Traffic congestion…
- Sedentary lifestyle disease…
The Victorian Government should not bear all the blame for its car-dependent policy direction. The current federal funding mechanism for transport projects prohibit walking, cycling and public transport improvements. The states must urge reform. Failure to do so may result in the Victorian Government’s wish list becoming a Pyrrhic victory.
Elliot Fishman is director of the Institute for Sensible Transport.
(27 July 2007)
Contributor Phil Hart writes:
Elliot Fishman is also convenor of ASPO in Melbourne.
