What do you get when you cross technology, community health, the housing bust, & the Transportation Bill?

[Marisel Brown]

Walkscore.com is the answer. Walkscore.com uses an algorithm to grade addresses based on nearby amenities, from restaurants and coffee shops to parks and libraries. Scores range from 0 to 100, with 100 being the most walkable; a score higher than 70 indicates it's possible to get around in the area without using a car. Walkscore.com has partnered with Transportation for America (T4A) to advocate for the inclusion of "walkability" provisions in the 2009 Transportation Bill.
A report, "Walking the Walk: How Walkability Raises Housing Values in U.S. Cities," was commissioned by CEOs for Cities, a national network of leaders from the civic, business, academic and philanthropic sectors. Walkscore.com's scores were featured in the report. The report looked at 94,000 real estate transactions in 15 markets. In 13 of the markets, higher levels of "walkability" were directly linked to higher home values.

Community health advocates have a new resource and data that may be compelling to business people, city officials, and elected officeholders. Increasing property values and lowering BMI........... there is a slogan somewhere in there.

Let us know your thoughts on this serendipitous collaborative effort.

Walkable cities Walkscore.com webpage
http://www.walkscore.com/transportation-bill.shtml" target="_blank
Walkscore.com press stories
http://www.walkscore.com/press-room.shtml" target="_blank

[Cindy Fallsen]

This sounds like a fantastic resource for the Community health network. Increasing property values and lowering BMI is never a bad thing.

[Marisel Brown]

Hi Cindy:
Hope all goes well with you. I am replying to your 10/14/09 comment to my post about Walk Score. It seems a study done at Brown validates Walk Score as good estimate of neighborhood walkability. I hope this info will be useful to the Community Health Network. The link to the study is in post below by Fiona Hyde. BTW take another look at this network and spread the word. There are some pretty interesting & useful posts added since the last time you probably visited. I try to post a few things each month to my page.

[Marisel Brown]

Hi Cindy:
Thank you for taking the time to read my post. I am delighted that you will share the resource with the Community Network. Please continue to check D4H-SN for more postings of this nature. Please feel free to share information related to obesity/chronic disease prevention. We take a very broad approach to those topics to bring new voices from non-health sectors that can contribute to improving public health.

HEADS-UP: We will be revamping our site just a bit to make it easier for members/visitors to go directly to content in four specific topic areas relevant to community health/population health improvement. Stay tuned for a survey.

Again, thank you for reading & sharing the post.

[Fiona Hyde]

WALK SCORE MAKES THE GRADE-Study validates walkabililty measures
Just recently I attended a meeting with pretty depressed real estate developers and brokers. One of the presentations mentioned Walk Score as a good tool for marketing properties or neighborhoods. I thought the name was sort of familiar so I googled. I found this post and want to update it.
I also found a presentation by Larry Carr of Brown University that found Walk Score to be a pretty reliable estimator of walkability. The pdf file is pretty huge so it may take a long time to download.
href="http://www.sbm.org/meeting/2010/presentations/Thursday/Paper%...