I've seen this walkability test in a number of places, and I finally was able to get my neighborhood's score: 42 out of 100. Oh well.
Of course, this doesn't imply that there aren't places to walk. I've been walking nearly every day this summer, roughly for an hour at a time, in part of an attempt to start living more healthily. There are plenty of places to walk about. If "walkability" denotes being able to walk to conduct normal errands, then yeah, I don't live in the most walkable of locales. But walking for the sake of walking? I've got it made.
(Well, almost. One of the only great flaws I can see in Buffalo's Southtowns region, which I love dearly and never want to leave, is the lack of a nice paved bike and walking path down here. The River Path in Tonawanda and the Ellicott Creek paths are nice, but they're at least ten miles away from Casa Jaquandor. West Seneca has a wonderful soccer field facility that's ringed by a mile-long paved path, but for change-of-scenery, it gets a little old -- and when the soccer tournaments get going, the place gets incredibly congested. (Which reminds me, people: the path is a path, not a place to set up your folding chairs. Grrr.))
Several days a week, if I want to get my walking in, I've had to get up at five in the morning to do it. I detest getting out of bed that early, really and truly, but I love the way the world looks in the hour just before dawn. This past Monday, when I got up it had finished raining just minutes before and was then clearing off, so everything was slightly damp, and mist was rising from the lawns and fields. To the East, the sky was reddening with the approaching dawn, and to the West, the full moon -- now red and hazy -- was sinking toward the horizon. One way the Sun, the other way the Moon.
Forty-two out of one hundred? On that morning, I gave my neighborhood a perfect walkability score.
The personal blog of author Kelly Sedinger, chronicling the adventures of one overalls-clad wanderer.
3 comments:
The test is very upfront about its flaws. My house got a 69, my mother's a 37. Mine's about right, but my mother's not going to walk across W.T. Harris Blvd in Charlotte. Just for fun, I did work places. My old job downtown got an 86, my new place in Corporate Woods a 38. But more than half the places within a mile of the place is on the other side of Interstate 90, and, as they say, "you can't get there from here."
Interesting, though.
Some of the flaws I noticed were that a lot of the info about local attractions or services was out of date or just plain wrong. For instance when I searched my workplace they have our "recreation grants" program listed as a park. If you consider a bunch of cubicles full of state workers and their coffee pot a park, then OK.
Jeez, my house got a 31. So the fact that I am within a mile of a church, elementary school, library, fire hall, drug store, convenience store, pizza place, and can get to all of them without crossing anything more than a 35 mph residential street doesn't really count for much I suppose.
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