When Susan Arterian Chang decided to return to White Plains, N.Y., after three "blissfully carless" years in London, she wanted to free her family from the auto-dependent life they knew before living overseas.
And all it took was moving to a home 1mile from her old neighborhood to do it.
In the same suburb they had moved from three years earlier, Chang, her husband and two children found a house closer to many services they need by using Walk Score (walkscore.com). The site created by Front Seat, a Seattle-based software company, rates the walkability of neighborhoods based on how easy it is to walk to amenities and services.
"With the surge in gas prices, people are really considering the consequences of where they live," says Mike Mathieu, chairman and founder of Front Seat. "The idea with Walk Score is to take walkability, a thing that used to be subjective, and make it objective."
San Francisco, New York and Boston came out on top of a list released by Walk Score on Thursday that ranks the country's 40 biggest cities by walkability. Charlotte, Nashville and Jacksonville sit at the bottom.
Neighborhoods within these cities are also ranked; San Francisco's Chinatown and Financial District, New York's Tribeca and Little Italy, and Boston's South End and Back Bay-Beacon Hill all have scores of 100.
The software is built on Google maps and pools U.S. Census data and Zillow neighborhood boundaries with Yellow Page information to assign values to locations such as schools, workplaces, supermarkets, parks and public spaces based on their proximity to an address. These values are combined for the neighborhood's final score.
A neighborhood with a score below 50 is "car-dependent." A score of 90 to 100 is a "Walker's Paradise."
Chang's old neighborhood had a score of 11. Her new home is a 77.
The system covers the USA, United Kingdom and Canada and has ranked more than 2 million addresses since its launch last July. Mathieu says Front Seat hopes to add more cities and towns to the ranking. Seattle's neighborhoods were ranked last month.
Chris Leinberger, a visiting fellow at The Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., and a Walk Score advisory member, says there is a "pent-up" market demand for walkable urbanism when people search for homes.
Scott Arbeit, who moved from Boston to Seattle to work for Microsoft, says sometimes he goes a week without moving his car from the driveway in his new neighborhood of Ballard, which has a Walk Score of 83. He walks for daily errands and gets to work on a connector bus run by Microsoft. He says that alone saves him $9 a day, and potentially more than $2,000 a year.
"But it's not really about the money," he says. "I was choosing a lifestyle, kind of pushing the reset button on my life."
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