August 15, 2008
How Walkable Are D.C. Neighborhoods?
The online tool allows you to plug in your own address in order to receive a "walkability score" based on the closeness of amenities like grocery stores, bars and restaurants, parks, and so on. According to their rankings, D.C. is the seventh most walkable city in the country, behind the usual suspects like San Francisco and New York (which makes a lot more sense than this ranking). They rank Dupont Circle as the most walkable neighborhood in the city, with a 99 out of 100 score. Dupont is also the 17th most walkable in the nation - take that, Center City Philadelphia! Adams Morgan, Logan Circle, Downtown, and 6 other neighborhoods rank as "walkers' paradises" with scores of 90 or above.
The site also highlights some problems the city has, with most of the city East of the Anacostia being ranked in the red "car-dependent" category, with patches of "somewhat walkable" yellow, while most of the rest of the city is "very walkable" or better. Other residential neighborhoods, like Palisades and Barnaby Woods, receive low scores too, which makes sense.
The rankings aren't perfect though — their methodology doesn't take into account public transit, barriers like highways and water bodies, topography (luckily for San Francisco) and so on. Their neighborhood boundaries, which come from Zillow, a real estate website, are a little suspect as well — Anacostia consists of almost all of the city east of the Anacostia River, for example. The business data, which comes from Google's Local Search API, is a bit out of date too: for my neighborhood, Columbia Heights, it doesn't include bars like Wonderland, and still has Visions ranked as a movie theater. If only. Business owners can add their spots to Google, but that can be asking a lot.
Despite the issues, it's a pretty neat site, and it's fun to see how walkable your house (or better yet, maybe a potential house) is.





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See, the problem with Dupont is that there's nothing worth walking to. Unless you count the P Street Bridge where you can watch guy's banging eachother in the woods every Saturday night like clockwork. You can set yr watch to that s**t. From The Fireplace to the Black Forest in 10 minits flat.
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Yeah, the scoring seems to be less than perfect. My place in Arlington (10 walking minutes from the Rosslyn Metro and the Courthouse restaurants and stores) got a score of 63. Then I checked it against my friends' place who live in Manassas in the middle of suburban gas station, walmart, 8 lane highway hell... they got 70!!
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They seem to be a little bit confused about what constitutes a grocery store. High Noon is not a grocery store, nor is the corporate HQ of Whole Foods, both of whih are apparently in my neighborhood but don't help me a lot when looking for eggs or milk...
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And it lists "AOL Moviephone" as a movie theater for Logan Circle. (Along with all of the stage theaters in the area.) And it lists lots of little convenience stores that left the area several years ago.
Which isn't to say that Logan Circle isn't a walker's paradise -- but that site's reliance on outdated info is annoying.
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have they even considered the novak effect on walkability?