How walkable is your neighborhood?

I recieved this link courtesy of the Pennsylvania Downtown Center. It is an amazing website called walkscore. You can have a lot of fun with this one.

Here is how it works. Basically, the website calculates a "walk score," which serves to tell you just how walkable your neighborhood is. It calculates this score by locating nearby uses which are necessary for every-day living, such as stores, restaurants, schools, religious institutions, nearby government centers, parks, etc. It then ranks your community on a scale of 0 - 100. The methodology is obviously more detailed then that, but the website does provide an in-depth explination about how the score is calculated.

This website is an outstanding tool. Not only can it help you determine a good neighborhood to live in, but it can also help you evaluate your community in terms of nearby amenities and what your community is missing. The biggest problem with this site, as you can see below, is that it is very dependant upon size. A smaller community will rank lower than a larger one; this, however, is largely a result of the lack of businesses that a smaller commmunity has. Unforunately, this score does not necessarily capture the fact that, in all four of my communities, you actually CAN walk from one destination to another. The website also doesn't necessarily make distinctions that make sense within a category (for example, in Bath, Condoms Galore is listed as a bookstore...can't say I agree with that categorization...).

The first thing I did on this website is calculate the walk scores for my four communities. Using Borough Hall as the address, here are the results:

Alburtis: 22 out of 100. I think this low score is largely a result of the fact that the Borough is relatively small (only about 2,100 people and a dozen or so businesses).
Coopersburg: 37 out of 100. The fact that Route 309 is nearby helps boost the score here, but again, the relatively small size of the Borough makes a higher score difficult.
Hellertown: 74 out of 100. A large Main Street with a good business mix helps boost Hellertown's score.
Macungie: 66 out of 100. Again, a good business mix helps increase the score.

I also calculated our other four communities: Bangor, Bath, Catasauqua and Wilson, also using their Borough Halls. The results:

Bangor: 63 of 100.
Bath: 52 of 100.
Catasauqua: 82 of 100.
Wilson: 72 of 100.