We saw some news about this a couple of weeks ago, and now the beta Google “Walk There” feature seems to be fairly widely implemented:

It’s summer in the Northern Hemisphere, and when it’s not too hot, it feels like a waste of gorgeous weather to get behind the wheel or hop in a cab. Doubly so when you’re traveling to a city you’d love to explore, and you’re pretty sure that you could walk from your hotel to the aquarium, if only you could figure out the way. You could try to use driving directions from Google Maps, but city centers are always a maze of one-way streets and no-left-turns. These driving directions from a local hotel to the Seattle Aquarium require numerous contortions in order to obey one-way streets and find a route under the freeway, taking you out of the way of where you could go by foot:

The above image shows driving directions from a Seattle hotel to the Seattle Aquarium. Notice the funky left turn onto 2nd Ave. I guess I had forgotten about just one of the many ways driving is often so wasteful.

Reading more at the Google LatLong blog post on this awesome new feature, we see that now the “Public Transit” directions now include better walking directions. They used to basically just say something like “get yourself to the bus stop over at 123 Jones Ave.” and drew a big arcing arrow path, but now they provide real walking directions for those parts of your public transit trip where you’ll be walking. Very cool stuff.

Walk Score is a very interesting and very important venture. I had first heard of them months ago, but didn’t pay them much attention; I had not yet connected the dots of how bikeability and walkability and open spaces all fall under the same umbrella called “Livable Streets.” We all wanted the same things, I just didn’t see the big picture yet.

So, a few months go by, the Livable Streets and biking and walking movements continue to pick up steam, and then Walk Score releases a report on America’s Most Walkable Neighborhoods and Cities. It looks at data for 2,508 neighborhoods across America.

And then I get an email that mentions that Google played some part in Walk Score, and sure enough, there it is on the Walk Score website:

Advisory Board

The Walk Score advisory board includes urban planning, environmental and technical experts from institutions such as The Sightline Institute, The Brookings Institution, and Google.

That doesn’t necessarily mean a whole lot, but it’s something. Google took some of their time to work on what is a very important public policy initiative—essentially advocating for more livable communities, or, at a minimum, a renewed dialogue on the role of transportation in America.

Walk Score is so important because it is helping to push the idea of livable communities into the public imagination, and it helps promote this with actual data and scores. They give this basic premise on their website:

About Walk Score

“What I can walk to” is a common home-buying and apartment-renting criterion. Walk Score’s patent-pending technology calculates a Walk Score for any property and shows a map of what’s nearby with reviews to help you find a great neighborhood.

Walk Score launched in July of 2007 and over 1 million addresses were searched in the first month. Walk Score has been featured in over 500 blogs and 75 newspaper articles and radio segments.

Our Mission

The Walk Score mission is to promote walkable communities. We believe that walking is good for our health, our communities, and our planet.

Very cool stuff. And you can visit the site, punch in your address, and get the Walkscore for your location. From there, it can serve as a tool for you and your neighbors to try to increase your walk score. The Walk Score algorithm is not perfect yet, but it should continue to get better and more accurate with time.

There are lots of folks who have played a part in Walk Score, among them (I’ll probably miss some, sorry) the main software house responsible for the tools, Front Seat. The Advisory Board is full of heavy hitters. Zillow.com provided information on the neighborhood boundaries.

The legislative action that Walk Score asks us to pay attention to is the upcoming Transportation Bill—the big Congressional kahuna that’s passed once every ten years. Talk about pork city. I’m not sure how much effect we’ll be able to have, given that Congress and other leaders have approval ratings that all seem to be the lowest in the history of America, and most encumbents seem to get re-elected for virtually their entire lives, but I’ll listen to whatever the Walk Score folks say. We can sign their petition, which sounds like a very good idea, and I’m sure we should all be following it as closely as we can, calling our reps, all the usual stuff. The legislation scene is not my game, but it’s crucial, of course, so when an organized group of citizens says they need our help, we need to be ready to support them if we agree with their cause. Transportation for America seems to be the driving organization behind the petition and lobbying Congress for more money for livable communities. They’re going to need all the help that they can get, so even if we only have a couple of minutes, we should definitely help them out however we can.

If you want to keep up with what Walk Score is up to—and I think that would be a worthwhile endeavor—they have a blog and a newsletter.