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How "Walkable" Is Your House?

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How "Walkable" Is Your House?

Old 07-21-07, 07:00 AM
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I think the distances are going to vary for each individual. I know I consider everything with in a 2 mile radius very walkable, 3 miles doable, and some people whine about having to walk a block to the city parking lot. The town we are planning on moving to is highly walkable and very easy to do by bicycle. There is really on one road in town the I would not recommend you ride on. The main part of town is laid out in a grid format so there are plenty of parallel streets to use. Most of all the stores are reachable by side streets or by cutting through parking lots. Just about everything you need is available in town. Only possible exception being high end bicycle parts and a book store. And those items can be ordered. Many people liken the upcoming oil collapse to a roll back to living similarly to the early 1900's....guess how they got stuff? Anybody remember mail order catalogs

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Old 07-21-07, 12:49 PM
  #52  
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Originally Posted by Machka

Yeah ... right. I lived there for 6 years without a vehicle! Driving is a must. Hah! Not true.

And you walk everywhere?

I thought not.
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Old 07-21-07, 12:53 PM
  #53  
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hmmm... trying for 2 days.... no luck, although my town is pretty walkable
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Old 07-21-07, 01:11 PM
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Originally Posted by JeffS
And you walk everywhere?

I thought not.
Think again.

I walked to get my groceries.
I walked to church.
I walked to my physiotherapist.
I walked to my Dr.
I walked to my tanning salon.
I walked the 4 miles to work in the winter when the roads were too icy for me to ride my bicycle.

There were only 3 places I couldn't easily walk: my chiropractor where I went a handful of times each year, the college where I took some night classes, and my vet where I went once or twice a year. My vet was within walking distance, but not while carrying 3 cats. For those occasions, I used the bus.

I also used the bus a few times when I was redecorating my apartment and wanted to haul home some larger pieces of furniture etc. ... but there was usually a lot of walking involved in those little adventures too.

I only used my bicycle for commuting to and from work. I didn't like to use my bicycle for anything else because I was a bit leary about it being stolen.

When I lived in Winnipeg, I was a skinny little rail of a girl ... I miss all that walking.

Last edited by Machka; 07-21-07 at 01:17 PM.
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Old 07-21-07, 01:38 PM
  #55  
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Hmmph. Don't bother with this test if you live in Canada, or Ottawa anyway. It gave me a score of 44, but pretty much messed up on its tests.

The grocery store list missed BOTH large-chain groceries stores, one of them across the street!
The restaurant and coffee shops list both miss several locations
The bars list is rather weird. Dairy Queen is a bar?
It missed a huge movie theatre complex.
It missed several schools, and the two closest branches of the Ottawa Public Library
It missed the huge Chapters books nearby, as well as the Home Depot.

I know most of these places on are Google Maps, so the filtering used by this site must be wonky. Chexk your won results carefully!
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Old 07-21-07, 01:54 PM
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Originally Posted by patc
Hmmph. Don't bother with this test if you live in Canada, or Ottawa anyway. It gave me a score of 44, but pretty much messed up on its tests.

The grocery store list missed BOTH large-chain groceries stores, one of them across the street!
The restaurant and coffee shops list both miss several locations
The bars list is rather weird. Dairy Queen is a bar?
It missed a huge movie theatre complex.
It missed several schools, and the two closest branches of the Ottawa Public Library
It missed the huge Chapters books nearby, as well as the Home Depot.

I know most of these places on are Google Maps, so the filtering used by this site must be wonky. Chexk your won results carefully!
That's Google mapping for you. It got Winnipeg all wrong too. But in general when you look things up on Google maps you'll see it is missing all sorts of stuff in Canada. Near where I live, a dam was built back in the early 1980s, and as a result a whole new set of roads was built, as well as a large recreational area (lots of campgrounds and stuff). All the paper maps since the early 1980s have all this information ... but Google maps doesn't. There's no lake (just the original river), and none of the new roads. It's like whoever created Google maps dug out an old map from a bottom drawer from about 1975 and based it all on that.

When I put in my address in Winnipeg the program ...
-- doesn't list the large grocery store about 1 km away from where I lived where I walked to get 99% of my groceries.
-- lists a library on the other side of the Assiniboine River ... but there are no bridges at that point, and it would be a very long walk to get to that library by the bridges that actually do exist.
-- doesn't list the library which was actually in my neighborhood, about 1 km away.
-- calls one store by a name it hasn't been called for probably about 7 years.
-- says there are no schools in the area ... but there is a high school about 0.5 kms away, and an elementary school where I walked to attend yoga classes about 1.5 kms away, and a few others just a little bit further than that.
-- doesn't list 3 other large grocery stores a little bit further away, but still sort of in the area.
-- doesn't even list the local Walmart!

Yeah, from looking at the map and what they do list in the way of roads, stores, etc., I'd say it is based on information from approx. 10 years ago. One bridge exists there which was built about in about 1997, but a mall is also on the map and it was demolished in about 1999, I believe.

It also seems to favor the little obscure places shops rather than the larger stores ... Superstore, Safeway, Zellers, Walmart, K-Mart, Extra Foods, and all the bigger, more well known ones aren't on there.

Last edited by Machka; 07-21-07 at 02:11 PM.
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Old 07-21-07, 02:20 PM
  #57  
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Originally Posted by Machka
That's Google mapping for you. It got Winnipeg all wrong too.
But that's the thing, Google DOES have that info for my area. I type in "grocery store", and it finds all the local big chains and more smaller stores than I new existed. That walkability test site must be filtering the results incorrectly, or mis-using the Google API.
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Old 07-21-07, 04:51 PM
  #58  
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I scored a 36. However, the grocery stores it showed were at least nine miles away in another town even thought there is one four blocks away. No mention of the super Xmart 2.5 miles away. It even showed a restaurant that has been out of business for more than five years. Some of the movie theaters are more than 40 miles away. Yeah, that's walking distance. However, they got all the local bars spot-on.
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Old 07-21-07, 07:29 PM
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Well I scored a 97 but I do live downtown Chicago so I already knew that I could pretty much walk to everything. I walk everywhere we aren't car free but our car only gets used about once a month.
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Old 07-21-07, 09:33 PM
  #60  
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Originally Posted by JeffS
4

Can't get much worse than that.
My grandparents house scored a zero.
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Old 07-21-07, 09:53 PM
  #61  
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I just did it. It's funny in that it lists lots of commodities that I don't use.

Groceries
According to them, I have a good selection of kosher groceries within 0.3 km and further away (2 km from home) a couple of Indian stores. They missed one decent and two very good fruit and vegetable stores, all within 0,4 km, a medium-size grocery at 0,5 km, and three or four large grocery stores at 1 to 3 km from home, plus a few ethnic stores I might visit occasionally.

I suspect the large groceries weren't found because "Provigo, Intermarché, Loblaws and Métro are not registred as groceries with Google. We don't have Safeways in Québec but we have lots of other choices!

Oh, I tend to walk one way rather than the other because the environment seems better, and I forget a third direction because there are two railway tracks in the way.

Restaurants
It works better only because there are so many. There are 8 listed, all at less than 0,15 km from home, and quite frankly I could list about 20 at less than 0,6 km.

Coffee shops
The software needs to travel 5 km to find 8 of them, except one would need to travel diagonally against the grid or through the mountain to reach those places. Yet I can find 10 of them within 3 km from home, using real streets

Movie theatres
No U.S. brand names, so none was found.

Schools
If you think Canadians are ignorant, it's because there aren't any schools in Montréal or in Canada. At least, that's what Google thinks. The closest schools are 70 km away (actually closer to 100 km by road), in U.S.!

Drugstores and Hardware
I don't recognize my neighbourhood! Where are those hardware stores that I visit regularly? Maybe it's because the neighbouring hardware is called "Ro-Na" rather than "Ace"?

With that, I get a score of 62, for a triplex that is right in the midst of the city (Mile-End–Plateau-Mont-Royal district)
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Old 07-21-07, 10:06 PM
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suburb of Pittsburgh. 51 points
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Old 07-21-07, 10:23 PM
  #63  
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Originally Posted by Michel Gagnon
Schools
If you think Canadians are ignorant, it's because there aren't any schools in Montréal or in Canada. At least, that's what Google thinks. The closest schools are 70 km away (actually closer to 100 km by road), in U.S.!
Well... Google is a great piece of software, but -- like all software -- it does some things well and falls down miserably for what it was not intended to do.

Likewise, if I were the US general who planned to launch an invasion into Canada, I would probably not use Google as my main reference. Although I might use Google Earth to see if there were any good bike trails into Montreal!
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Old 07-22-07, 12:52 PM
  #64  
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Plateau Montreal, 64 out of 100.

they certainly leave out a lot.. like my fav portuguese chicken place on St-Laurent
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Old 07-22-07, 02:05 PM
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Finally its working... 65
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Old 07-22-07, 03:11 PM
  #66  
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Originally Posted by Wogsterca
They only have US locations, so I'm out as well......
Correction, they do list Canadian places, my house got a 31, they missed:

A drug store at .25 miles
A Fruit market/grocery at .25 miles
A Bakery at .25 miles
4 Schools, a high school at .75 miles and a public school at .5 miles
A coffee shop at .6 miles.
The place they list as a book store, isn't, and never was
They miss a whole plaza at 2.5 miles, that has been there for many years.

They don't officially support Canadian addresses though, so that may be part of the problem.
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Old 07-22-07, 04:17 PM
  #67  
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I think the site is a little crappy. It missed dozens of locations in my hood, including 2 supermarkets that are closer than the one they did list. Also a bigger hardware store closer than the listed one. they listed a couple crappy restaurants and missed a score of good ones.

If you want to know how walkable your neighborhood is, just take a walk!
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Old 07-22-07, 05:15 PM
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Originally Posted by Roody
I think the site is a little crappy. It missed dozens of locations in my hood, including 2 supermarkets that are closer than the one they did list. Also a bigger hardware store closer than the listed one. they listed a couple crappy restaurants and missed a score of good ones.

If you want to know how walkable your neighborhood is, just take a walk!
I believe that is the general consensus I suppose the website might get people to thinking and looking further than the end of their car key. So it may be a good thing. I have yet to find a perfect mapping program and I use several of them. DeLorme used to be one of the best but even they have issues with not putting things where they belong.

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Old 07-22-07, 05:18 PM
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What 58, how lame I live inner city in Houston and literally have everything with in my reach. The only time I ridden the bus in the past year and half was once to go to the doctor, had a fever and bad cough not in the mood to ride. Mine lists a place that sells refrigeration units as a coffee shop, huh?? Though it did point out a few things I was unaware of.
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Old 07-22-07, 06:15 PM
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My house gets a 93 out of 100. My old condo (which was really in a perfect location) got 98 out of 100!

The fairly rural suburb I grew up in... 9 out of 100.

My inlaws house in a "first ring suburb", only 1/2 mile from most services and the commuter rail, gets 45.
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Old 07-23-07, 09:03 AM
  #71  
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My place gets a 75 out of 100 for walking. I guess that sounds about right, but I usually don't walk further than 2 blocks because at that point it becomes easier for me to ride my bike.

I was surprised by how many "grocery stores" were listed. I only shop at one small corner store and otherwise, it's the larger, cheaper, further-away stores or the farmers' market.
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Old 07-23-07, 11:32 AM
  #72  
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29....not too good...
the grocery is only .8 miles away, though.
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Old 07-23-07, 12:13 PM
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I got an 85/100 for my current place.

My old house in the suburbs got a 0/100 - lol
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Old 07-23-07, 01:08 PM
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I got a 45. Amazing. We have tons of sidewalks, and the following within 1 mile:

15 restaurants and bars
2 bike shops
3 coffee shops
2 public libraries
half dozen or so parks
elementary school
middle school
high school
2 grocery stores
1 hardware store
1 university

What else do you need? I think that the software must assume some minimum acceptable walking distances. Must be low like 0.25 mile or something. I think 2 miles would be more like it. Heck, my 4 and 6 year olds walk two miles round trip to the ice cream store.

I think that this would be a good tool for prospective homebuyers/movers if it were much more accurate.
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Old 07-23-07, 03:15 PM
  #75  
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Originally Posted by cerewa
My place gets a 75 out of 100 for walking. I guess that sounds about right, but I usually don't walk further than 2 blocks because at that point it becomes easier for me to ride my bike.

It's funny now that you mention that. I enjoy walking a lot. In fact, if I have time, I prefer to walk in the city (I mean mostly inner city) than to cycle, because I have the time to look at houses, storefronts, people and the like. However, when I go shopping, I often prefer to take the bike simply because its panniers or trailer provide me with a convenient way to carry the stuff home.
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