We’re excited to announce that Walk Score has received Part 2 of a grant from Active Living Research, a national program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

We will be working with Dr. Lawrence Frank and Urban Design 4 Health to continue to align Walk Score with the latest research on urban design, walkability, and health. Specifically, we will enhance Walk Score to include more pedestrian friendliness metrics and to increase the correlation between Walk Score and on-the-ground walking behavior.

Why does this matter? One of our goals is to promote research on walkable neighborhoods by providing a cost-effective national walkability metric.  We hope that by increasing the accuracy of Walk Score, we can make our data more useful to researchers.

In Phase 1 of our grant, we developed Street Smart Walk Score and Walk Score was found by Urban Design 4 Health ”to be strongly and significantly correlated with an already validated measure of walkability.”

Who uses Walk Score data? Walk Score data is used by leading researchers and city planning departments including CEOs for Cities and the Washington DC Office of Planning.

We’re the first to admit that Walk Score isn’t perfect—so we look forward to adding more “street smarts” to Walk Score with this grant!

“Walk Score data helps us understand which corridors and station locations perform best from a land use perspective—which is often a key missing input in transportation planning where the primary focus is on ‘node’ (stations) rather than ‘place’ considerations,” said Curt Upton, the Light Rail Planning Coordinator for The City of Phoenix Planning and Development Services Department.

Walk Score of Existing and Proposed Light Rail Stations

To evaluate station performance, Phoenix used 60,723 data points in shapefile format that included:

• Street Smart Walk Score
• Average block length
• Intersection density

Housing, employment, and Walk Score data used to measure TOD

Phoenix plans to use Walk Score data in a similar fashion to evaluate the performance of their canal corridors.  Did you know Phoenix has 181 miles of canals (and Venice, Italy has 125 miles of canals)?  Here’s a great video on the canals of Phoenix.

Read the full case study: Analyzing Light Rail Station Area Performance in Phoenix.

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.

Walk Score data is now available in a variety of formats (spreadsheet, GIS shapefile, API) and includes the following:

• Walk Score for all U.S. and some international locations
• Transit Score and nearby public transit (where available)
• Road metrics such as intersection density, block length, link/node
• Walkability heat maps for your area

We’ve also compiled a library of research that uses Walk Score data.

Interested in using Walk Score in your research? Send us a note.

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.

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.

Below is a screenshot from the front page of Yahoo! Real Estate in Japan.  See the big picture of a train?

Picking the subway line or subway station near where you’d like to live is the primary way to search for a home or apartment on many Japanese real estate websites.  Picking the subway line comes before picking your price range, before picking the number of bedrooms, before picking a neighborhood, etc.  Exotic, isn’t it?!

Search by Subway Line - Front Page of Yahoo! Real Estate Japan

Here I’ve selected the Yamanote line to search for properties.  Real estate near the Yamanote line is desirable and expensive (more on why below).

Now I can select the subway stations on the Yamanote line where I’d like to search for real estate.

Search for Properties by Subway Station

Now I see the list of properties near the subway stations I’ve selected.

And drum roll please…  each property shows the walking distance to the nearest subway station!

In fact, my Japanese sources (pictured at the bottom of this post) tell me that the walking distance to the nearest subway station is the thing they look at first on a real estate listing.

Property Listings Show Walking Distance to Subway Stations

What is Transit-Oriented Development?

Transit-oriented development (TOD) is mixed-use residential and commercial development designed to maximize access to public transit.  TOD is a hot topic among urban planners right now—but Japan has been doing it for decades!

Why did Japanese real estate evolve this way? It turns out that Japanese rail companies built their subway lines on land they already owned—and these same companies developed the real estate around the subway lines. This ensured that there were enough people within walking distance of the subway.  In other words, the subway lines and real estate were developed together… which is exactly transit-oriented development!

An interesting side effect of this process is that the companies who built the subway lines tended to develop similar real estate along the entire line.  For example, a luxury company would develop high-end real estate along their subway line.  This is why real estate on the Yamanote line is considered desirable and is expensive—it was developed to be luxurious!  Imagine if people in the Bay Area said, “I’ve always wanted to live on the Pittsburgh / Bay Point line.  The real estate along that line is really choice.”

Public Transit on U.S. Real Estate Listings

As more cities in the U.S. benefit from transit-oriented development (like the Seattle light rail that is being extended as I type this) we expect to see more real estate listings showing nearby transit.

Walk Score has already helped hundreds of real estate sites show nearby public transit on their listings and we’re considering making our public transit data available via an API.  Contact us if you’re interested in showing public transit on your site.

Thanks to Takeshi and Yasuo from NHK TV in Japan who came to our offices to interview us about Walk Score—little did they know I was going to interview them about Japanese real estate!

I’m @mrlerner on Twitter.

Harriet Tregoning is the Director of the Office of Planning for Washington D.C.  Last month at the New Partners for Smart Growth Conference she gave the following presentation on how D.C. is using Walk Score as an urban planning metric.

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.

• 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