By Eric Sundquist
For agencies that want to address the land use-transportation connection, Walk Score now provides a new form of accessibility measure, as well as data to help measure trends over time.
Walk Score, which actually produces measures for biking and transit as well as walking, has analyzed accessibility by the proximity of certain destinations, such as food stores and parks. Now the firm is offering a way to measure the depth of choices of such destinations as well, in a platform called ChoiceMaps. In the map of Chicago below, for example, the green area indicates places where there are at least 10 grocery options in a 10-minute walk.
Perhaps more important, the firm now is providing trend data that can track accessibility over time. This will be useful in assessing progress toward goals such those in Washington’s Sustainability DC plan, which calls for pedestrian accessibility of healthy food.
SSTI, which has no connection to Walk Score, has urged agencies to consider using the firm’s products as a ready-made accessibility scoring system. These new improvements make the product even more appealing.
Eric Sundquist is Managing Director of SSTI.