Walk Score vs Walk Appeal

Sarah Goodyear, writing for The Atlantic Cities, chimes in on the Walk Appeal conversation:

That’s the hard truth about walking in America. It’s not just about the miles you need to cover, or even about the sidewalks or the length of the blocks. What Walk Score can’t capture, and doesn’t pretend to, is the on-the-ground texture of the pedestrian experience and the resulting pedestrian culture of a place…

Which is really what it comes down to in much of the country. You may well find yourself within walking distance of a store, or a movie theater, or some other amenity that is accounted for by Walk Score’s algorithms. There might even be a sidewalk that provides safe passage, and a button to push at the intersection to make the light change in your favor. But you usually will be walking alongside a river of cars, and the people in those cars will be thinking that you are strange. They will pity you. You will know this.

I think there are two interesting points here. First, Sarah provides a great example of how the quality of the walking environment is as much, if not more, important than the quantity of destinations. Unfortunately Walk Score only measures quantity and has no metric for the “Walk Appeal” of a place.

Second, Sarah touches on an interesting social and cultural factor in the acceptability of walking as a primary form of transportation. It is unfortunate that walking has a stigma attached. In most regions only the poor and teenagers who can’t drive are regular walkers. I have caught myself wondering “what those trouble making teenage boys are up to” when I see a group of kids walking down an unwalkable street. Part of the reason for the stigma is that the only people walking are at the margins of society.