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.

In 1969, 42% of children walked or biked to school.

In 2001, 16% of children walked or biked to school¹.

During a similar time period childhood obesity increased from 6.5% to 17%².

These stats are striking: about 2.5 times fewer children walk to school and about 2.5 times more children are obese.

Walk Scores for Schools

Wouldn’t you want your child’s school to be a walkers’ paradise? We’re excited to announce that Education.com is now showing Walk Scores for schools!

School Data on Walk Score

We’re also showing Education.com’s school data on all Walk Scores in the United States:

We’ll be doing more with walkable schools in the future—and we’re excited about this first step!

MyNewPlace, the second most trafficked apartment and home rentals Web site in the U.S., now makes it easy to find the most walkable apartments for rent in your city.

And when you look up an address on the Walk Score site you now have 1-click access to see nearby apartments for rent on MyNewPlace, sorted by Walk Score!

“With the addition of search by Walk Score rating, MyNewPlace may be the ‘greenest’ apartment site on the Web, “said Mike Mathieu, founder of Front Seat, makers of Walk Score. “The easiest way to save money on transportation and lower your environmental impact is to move to a more walkable neighborhood and that is attractive to many renters.”

Sort by Walk Score on MyNewPlace:

Search results show their Walk Score in the summary:

Walk Score now links to nearby Walkable Rentals from MyNewPlace:

Widget!
We also built a widget with MyNewPlace that you can put on your own site to help your visitors find walkable apartments.

Get this widget for your site!

“A recent MyNewPlace survey indicated 79 percent of renters believe neighborhood information is an important factor when deciding on a particular apartment over another,” said Mark Moran, vice president of marketing for MyNewPlace. “Utilizing leading-edge walkability technology available from Walk Score allows us to provide prospects with an in-depth feel for a neighborhood thereby making them a more qualified lead for landlords.”

A big thanks to all the folks at MyNewPlace for all their great work on helping to promote walkable neighborhoods!

We’ve now added transit data from 80+ agencies to Walk Score as part of our grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.

While adding transit to Walk Score we realized there was a larger opportunity to:

1. Highlight all the great apps that use public transit data
2. Show which transit agencies do and don’t provide open data to software developers

Announcing City-Go-Round

So today we’re launching a new site called City-Go-Round where you can search for innovative transit apps and websites in your city. You can also check whether your transit agency provides open data.

Find apps in your city:
www.CityGoRound.org

Read the City-Go-Round press release.

These Apps are Rad

We had no idea how many innovative transit apps were already out there.  Here are some of our favorites:

One Bus Away: Find out exactly where your bus is in Seattle.  Check City-Go-Round to see if your city has a real-time arrival app.

Acrossair: Hold your iPhone up to see augmented-reality transit maps.  Whoa, the future is now.

Exit Strategy NYC: Perhaps the most creative app we’ve seen, Exit Strategy NYC shows you where to stand so you can get out of the subway station faster!

A huge thank you to Benjamin de la Peña and team at the Rockefeller Foundation for supporting City-Go-Round and public transit on 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!