How walkable is your neighborhood?

I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking…

~Henry David Thoreau

Ask anyone interested in urban development where you should start reading on the subject and they'll probably tell you to pick up a copy of The Death and Life of Great American Cities; Jane Jacob's seminal tome on how cities work (or don't) is widely regarded as the Bible of urban planning. In 1961, the year TDaLoGAC was published, Jacobs was responding to the explosion of suburban black holes rapidly expanding and sucking the life force from urban centers around the nation. Her fiery indictments against sprawl became the manifesto for intelligent urban design, laying down principles we take as common sense today; healthy cities require high population density, small, mixed-use blocks, street grids that offer multiple routes to a destination…in other words, walkability.

Back when I first picked up the book, I remember the deep pleasure of devouring Jacob's furious prose was interrupted by a moment of defensive bristling—somewhere in the "need for small blocks" chapter—when she singles out Daniel Burnham's boulevard chain (in which my own beloved block forms a link) as a stellar example of lousy urban planning: prohibitively wide streets, interminable, all-residential blocks—a recipe for isolation and car dependency. So it was with a twinge satisfaction that I noted my address weighs in at a solid 71 out of 100 on the new Walk Score, just barely clearing the "very walkable" baseline.

Primarily a tool for realtors and prospective home buyers or renters, the Walk Score website provides a rating scale of neighborhood walkability, based on the proximity, plentitude and variety of amenities. It's a handy tool for anyone remotely checking out an unfamiliar neighborhood; plug in an address and Walk Score pulls up a Google map peppered with icons for all the schools, stores, theaters, parks, bars, restaurants, etc in 10-minute strolling distance plus all the relevant contact info. Also fun is the ranking system, which places Chicago as the 4^th most walkable city in the U.S., right between Boston and Philly.

Missing from the Walk Score algorithm are a few key Jacobsian factors, the most important one (and most easily rectified with use of readily available local PD stats) probably being crime rates. Chapter 1, verse 1 of TDaLoGAC is on the necessity of safe sidewalks. The folks at Walk Score are the first to point out other problematic omissions from their calculations like topography, weather conditions and an as-the-crow-flies yardstick that omits the layout of not only streets, but obstacles like freeways and waterways as well.

Still, it's a neat tool and potentially a fun way to discover small businesses in your hood or compare the walkability of, say, Wrigley Field (88) to U.S. Cellular Field (63). Or maybe just supply fresh inspiration to leave your car—or even bike—at home and engage in the lost art of walking.