Walk score: data and conceptualization issues

People are writing about WalkScore's city rankings. See for example this entry from the Smart Growth America blog, "The morning’s Walk Score coverage."

There are a couple problems with WalkScore. First, its data set (based on Google) can't be claimed to be comprehensive. Second, we don't just walk. Those of us who are transit dependent by choice or necessity also use transit. In any case, walking + transit and trip chaining expands our options. Third, some of us ride bicycles as well and accomplish tasks that way.

I wrote before that shockingly, I didn't do a comprehensive analysis of the array of amenities available to me before deciding to live in upper northwest DC. Sure, we checked out the proximity of a local shopping strip, which has a dry cleaner, barber ($8 haircuts!), a couple restaurants (one with pretty good Caribbean food), and a corner store (now closed), the distance to the Takoma Metro station, and location of a Safeway and CVS stores, knowing of course about the Takoma Park retail district as well.

But there is actually much more available to us, on Georgia Avenue and elsewhere, and because for the most part I prefer Giant to Safeway, and because Google clued me into the quickest way to get there, I still shop at Giant, but at the store at Riggs Road and Eastern Avenue (just across the DC line) because it is 2 miles closer to me than the store in Columbia Heights. If I had to walk there it would suck, but taking the bike it's 7 minutes away. And via transit or bicycle, the regional shopping destinations of Columbia Heights and Silver Spring are also close by.

When you add transit + bicycling as an supplement to walking, the scores would be much different I think. (My new place is 60. When I lived on Capitol Hill it ranked a 97 on the Walkscore. My H Street adjacent abode an 83.) And much more is available to you.

In my new neighborhood, adding bicycling as a mobility method makes many amenities comfortably reachable. And you have a lot more control over bicycling than you do transit (waiting for buses and subways). On the bike, you just go.