The walkability of a neighborhood is an intangible quality that doesn’t appear on real estate listings like the number of bathrooms or the square footage. But living in a place where you can walk to grocery stores, restaurants, movie theaters, hair salons, and other amenities makes life in certain places enormously different (and, I believe, better) than those where driving is the only option.

A neat new tool lets you plug in an address and compute a “walk score” for any address. It automatically searches Google Maps for nearby businesses of various types and computes an overall score. With a grocery store 0.08 miles away and other amenities nearly as close, my current address scores 98 out of 100 (not surprising) whereas the suburban house where I grew up rates a mere 9 (as we never walked to do any errands as far as I can remember). My apartments in California score 60 (near downtown Mountain View) and 17 (in the foothills of Cupertino). For a tool that estimates based on a few imprecise factors, it’s amazingly accurate.

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Tagged: development, maps, pedestrians, smart growth, technology, urban policy, walk score

David Alpert created Greater Greater Washington in 2008 and was its executive director until 2020. He formerly worked in tech and has lived in the Boston, San Francisco Bay, and New York metro areas in addition to Washington, DC. He lives with his wife and two children in Dupont Circle.