We’ve been hard at work creating a preview of Street Smart Walk Score—an enhanced version of Walk Score that uses walking distances rather than crow-flies distances to calculate your score.

Street Smart Walk Score also looks at the underlying road network to compute the number of intersections per square mile and average block length. These two measures are great indicators of walkability.

How it Works

For every Street Smart score, we generate hundreds of walking routes to find the nearest amenities. We also analyze the underlying street data to calculate the number of intersections and average block length.

Street Smart Walk Score gives more weight to amenities that are highly correlated with walking. In addition, multiple amenities in each category count towards your score—for example, we count 10 restaurants to reflect the depth of choice that walkable neighborhoods offer.

And, when you look up a Street Smart Walk Score, we give you a report showing exactly how many points each amenity contributed to your score. This makes the algorithm easy to understand and transparent.

We developed Street Smart Walk Score in conjunction with the Walk Score Advisory Board and Dr. Larry Frank, Professor of Sustainable Transportation at the University of British Columbia, and with funding from Active Living Research, a national program office of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Street Smart Example

Is this water clean enough for swimming?

No swimming necessary.

The Walk Score Amenity Map, which is used by over 5,000 real estate sites, is now available for integration into mobile websites, iPhone and Android apps. With almost no development effort, companies can add a map of nearby points of interest including restaurants, shopping and public transit to their mobile experiences.

Learn more about the new Walk Score Mobile Amenity Map and Walk Score Professional services.

Are we missing your favorite coffee shop?

Is Walk Score still showing that restaurant that closed last month?

No one knows your neighborhood better than you! Now you can add and remove places from the Walk Score map to make sure your neighborhood is accurate and up-to-date.

Something missing from Walk Score? Now you can add it!

You asked: “Why don’t you have neighborhood rankings for my city?” and “How come my city doesn’t make your list of most walkable cities?”

We listened: We’ve processed over 8 million data points and now have Walk Score heat maps for the 2,500 largest U.S. cities and neighborhood walkability rankings for many of these.

So whether you’re searching for Aberdeen (Maryland, South Dakota or Washington) or Zanesville, Zephyrhills or Zion, or virtually anywhere in between, we’ve got you covered.

And if you’re spending Turkey Day in Topeka or decking the halls in Denver, be sure to check Walk Score before you go – the nearest pub, coffee shop, gym or book store could be just a short walk away.

Walkability map of Minneapolis & St. Paul

When we launched Transit Score and Commute Reports last month, people asked, “is Bike Score next?”

So we ask you, what would it mean for a location to have a high Bike Score?

Submit your ideas for what we should include in Bike Score.

Tell us your Bike Score ideas!

Not only do we think biking is great—but in a growing number cities, home shoppers are including bike access as a key decision making criteria.

So give us your feedback and then check out the hottest bicycle blog on the planet, Copenhagen Cycle Chic.

Following the recent launch of our Customize Map and Commute Report tabs, we just launched a new Neighborhood tab for addresses within the 40 largest U.S. cities.

Walk Score Neighborhood Tab

Now, when you look up a Walk Score or Transit Score, it’s easier to to learn more about the walkability of the surrounding neighborhood.

Don’t see your city or neighborhood yet? Tweet us @walkscore or follow us on Facebook, tell us where you live, and we’ll make sure your city and neighborhood is on our list to add.

Ever wished Walk Score included post offices, hospitals, or bike shops? Or what about art galleries or laundromats or donut shops?

Now you can create a custom Walk Score map with the amenities that matter most to you.

Just type an address, click the Customize Map tab, and begin building your map.

[Changing amenities will not change your Walk Score.]

Let us know what you think.

When deciding where to live and work, not only do you want to know what amenities and services are nearby, you also want to understand your transportation options. How easily can you walk, bike or take the bus? How long will it take to get from point A to point B? And how much will it cost?

Last year, with the support of The Rockefeller Foundation, we set out to address these questions. And building on the initial integration of public transit information into Walk Score and the launch of City-Go-Round, today we are pleased to take another step forward in promoting transparency around transportation choices.

Our new Transit Score and custom Commute Reports empower anyone to quickly understand the proximity of public transportation and their commuting options.

Read the official press release.

What’s your Transit Score?

Transit Score of Boston

Similar to Walk Score, Transit Score provides a 0-100 rating indicating how well an address is served by public transportation. Ratings range from “Rider’s Paradises” that have world-class bus and rail service to areas with limited or no nearby public transportation. Transit Score is currently available in over 40 cities where public transit information is available. These cities include Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington D.C.

What will your commute be like?

Commute Report in Seattle

After you’ve looked up an address on Walk Score, you can now get a summary of commuting options, including the time it would take to get to your work, school or other location by car, bike and foot and to see nearby public transit stops and routes. The customized commute report also includes a visual representation of the hills between your home and work to better understand how bikable or walkable the route may be.

Can you really afford this home?

Housing and Transportation Costs

For most families, transportation is the second largest household expense. Walk Score’s new home and transportation costs calculator makes it easier for people to understand the true costs of owning or renting in a particular location. Based on a few simple pieces of information, the calculator generates an estimated monthly amount that includes housing and transportation costs.

In particular, we’d like to thank Benjamin de la Pena, Associate Director at The Rockefeller Foundation, and the team at the Center for Neighborhood Technology who have been great partners on this initiative.

We’re transparent about how Walk Score works and how it doesn’t work — and you’re vocal about the things you’d like to see us improve!

So 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.  Walk Score currently gives this location a higher score than it deserves, because crow-flies distances assume you’ll walk across the freeway.

Walking across the freeway is dangerous.

The new “Street Smart” Walk Score uses walking routes and gives this location a lower score.

Walking routes to amenities.

Here’s another example from Baltimore where Walk Score currently assumes you will swim:

Is this water clean enough for swimming?

Here’s a more accurate picture of what you can walk to — but the score doesn’t change much:

No swimming necessary.

Pedestrian Friendliness

“Street Smart” Walk Score also incorporates a number of metrics that urban planners use to measure pedestrian friendliness:

• Intersection density measures how many intersections there are in a square mile— more is better.
• Another metric is something called link/node ratio.  This measures how many roads go into each intersection (e.g. a 4-way intersection is more walkable than a 1-way cul-de-sac).
• Since shorter length blocks are more pedestrian friendly than long mega-blocks, block length as another proxy for pedestrian friendliness.

Here they are for my house in Seattle:

Pedestrian Friendliness Metrics

We’re currently working with Urban Design 4 Health and our advisory board on these refinements to the Walk Score algorithm.  Stay tuned for more updates.

A big thanks to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for funding this work.

We’re excited to announce a new grant from Active Living Research, a national program office of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The goal of the Active Living Research program is to support research to prevent childhood obesity and support active communities.

Under this grant, we will evaluate modifications to Walk Score that include using walking distances rather than as-the-crow-flies distances as well as deeper analysis of the road network to determine pedestrian friendliness.

As part of this collaborative grant, we will be working with Urban Design 4 Health and Dr. Lawrence Frank, a leading walkability researcher from the University of British Columbia.

It’s energizing to see the interest in Walk Score from the academic and policy communities, and we look forward to continuing to partner with researchers and organizations such as CEOs for Cities, Dr. Gary Pivo, and Dr. Lucas Carr.