Walk Score

Less than one week after we launched transit on Walk Score, 3 new transit agencies have opened their data and are now live on Walk Score:

• Cleveland, OH Regional Transit Authority
• Kansas City, MO KCATA
• San Diego, CA North County Transit District

Kudos to these forward-looking transit agencies!

But get this… Over 400+ transit agencies have made their public transit feeds available to Google—but only 40+ have made that data available to the public!

Sign our petition to open up transit data.

Transit in Cleveland, OH

The Local Market Explorer plugin from Zillow is a simple way to add data from Walk Score, Education.com, and Zillow to your blog—and it just got better.

Zillow just released version 2 of the Local Market Explorer.  Improvements include support for neighborhoods and ZIPs, video embedding, and easier customization.

Download version 2 of the Local Market Explorer plugin here or read more on the Zillow blog.

Check out these sample pages on the Geek Estate Blog:

• Pearl District, Portland, OR
• Upper Eastside, New York, NY
• Los Angeles, CA

Enjoy!

Big news!  We’re thrilled to announce that the Rockefeller Foundation awarded a grant to Front Seat (makers of Walk Score) to enhance Walk Score.

We’re using the grant to add public transit, transportation cost, and greenhouse gas emission data to Walk Score.   We’re also going to make Walk Score open source!

Today we are launching WalkScore.org where we’ll make the Walk Score source code publicly available.  We’ll also host forums there for discussing walkability and other improvements to Walk Score. Visit WalkScore.org to sign up for updates.

So what does this mean for you?

• You’ll see public transit stops on the Walk Score map
• Public transit accessibility will be factored into your Walk Score
• You’ll see your predicted transportation cost and greenhouse gas emissions provided by The Center for Neighborhood Technology

We are grateful to the Rockefeller Foundation for their generosity, vision, and support!

Read the press release.

Thank you John D. Rockefeller!

If your Walk Score is 70, is that good or bad?

We just added a “Compare Your Score” feature to Walk Score that shows how your score compares to other people in your city. Look up any address on Walk Score and you’ll see the new Compare Your Score box just under the map.

Well, I thought I was sitting pretty with a Walk Score of 95 in Seattle—but it turns out 14% of Seattlites have a higher Walk Score!

How about where I grew up in Kansas?  That house has a Walk Score of 60 and 29% of Topekans have a higher score.

Don’t tell my boss, but I just spent the last hour looking up every place I’ve lived!

Findwell is the 2nd website we know of that offers Walk Score + transit search.

Let’s pretend you’re buying a home and in addition to liking your health and the environment, you think buying a walkable house near the new Seattle light rail is a solid investment.

Simply go to findwell and search for Walk Score 90+ homes within 1/4 mile of the light rail.

Voilà!

Findwell real estate is powered by Estately real estate search.  Can you real estate platform do this?   If not, talk to Galen Ward at Estately.

Zillow just released their Local Market Explorer plugin for WordPress that provides a great overview of the home values, schools, local businesses, Walk Score, and photos of a city.

You can easily customize the plugin to turn on and off any of the following modules:

Here are live examples of the plugin for these cities:

• Atlanta
• Boston
• Houston
• Los Angeles
• Miami
• San Diego
• Seattle

Congrats to Zillow, Andrew Mattie, and Jonathan Mabe from Diverse Solutions who built this!

My first thought seeing this is that we should create a Walk Score neighborhood rankings widget for this plugin!

The Walk Score iPhone App is available for free in the Apple App Store!  The app makes it simple to get the Walk Score where you are right now.

Download the app to get:

• The Walk Score of any location
• Map of nearby amenities with walking directions
• No more typing addresses! (use GPS instead)
• Reviews and ratings of amenities

We’ve rounded up the top customer requests and are pleased to announce Version 2 of the Walk Score Tile!

New features include:

• Google Street View
• Ability to customize height and layout
• Smooth map scrolling between amenities
• Faster load time (compressed JavaScript)
• Search box to look up additional Walk Scores (links to WalkScore.com)

My favorite feature is scrolling through the amenities near a property with street view turned on—you can see whether the nearby coffee shop is your kind of place!

Here’s another screenshot:

Enjoy and send any feedback our way!

Have you ever wanted to see a Walk Score map with houses for sale overlaid on top?

Thanks to the hax0rs (that is geek for “hackers”) at M Realty in Portland, now you can!

A moving picture is worth a thousand thousand words so here is Garron Selliken from M Realty showing off their Walk Score maps:

Here’s my favorite screenshot of the feature: you can see houses for sale on top of the Walk Score heat map.  Note the difference in walkability between the Hawthorne neighborhood (green = walkable) and the Mt. Tabor neighborhood (red = less walkable).

Thanks to M Realty for being the first real estate website to integrate Walk Score heat maps!  And if you don’t know, Garron and M realty have the most tricked out mobile office in the real estate industry:

That’s right, you’ve probably never heard the words “fun” and “census data” in the same sentence before.  We’re starting to gear up for our next round of walkability rankings and wanted a quick way to compare the various city boundaries offered by the U.S. Census.

We asked our long-time collaborator Umbrella Consulting to put together this census boundary map so we could look at metropolitan statistical areas vs. urban places vs. incorporated places. Pretty cool to see all 20,000 U.S. cities visualized on the map!

The Walk Score API is churning away as you read this, calculating the Walk Scores of all the cities below…