Sunday, June 15, 2008

Nice site on "walkability"

Apologies for the lack of posting recently ... a combination of being heads down on whereyougonnabe together with a couple of other projects, plus fitting in some vacation time over in Europe (I highly recommend visiting Porto). We will have a significant upgrade to whereyougonnabe coming very shortly, but I'll save that for another post.

But in the mean time, I noticed this post from Paul Ramsey on how glad he was to live in a walkable neighborhood, which reminded me of a nice site called Walk Score which I've been meaning to post about. It ranks where you live based on the amenities you can walk to (based on the Google Local Search API), and like Paul I'm glad to report that I am in a good spot - my loft in downtown Denver scores 95 points out of 100.

The site seems to have reasonable international coverage too - I tried it for a few locations I know in Canada and the UK, and it gave good results for both. They even kindly provide results for various "celebrity locations" - Bill Gates' home only scores 11 out of 100, for example, while President Bush's ranch in Texas scores 0! Anyway, I thought it was a nicely done and interesting site.