Close - interactive map for walkable cities

[Toasty Joe]

@NatMakesMaps posted about this new website Close.city he launched that lets you see how walkable a city is for your needs: grocery stores, public transit, restaurants, gyms, parks, coffee shops, etc. I took some screenshots of our major cities with the above parameters to see how they fare, and felt it would spark some interesting discussion. You can change the filters, check out different cities, or just play around: https://close.city/

Note it's only US for now (and weirdly no data for DC), and the images are roughly around the same scale, but there doesn't appear to be a way to view / control that. Hopefully future updates address that -- and make it easier to compare cities


NYC




Chicago




LA




SF




Seattle




Miami




Boston




Philly




Atlanta




Houston




DFW




Austin




Phoenix




Denver




Portland, OR




St. Louis




Las Vegas




Nashville




Pittsburgh

[edale]

Houston made me LOL.

These maps are really interesting. The LA one made me think of the thread that discussed whether LA was urban. You can clearly see there are many nodes that are walkable, but the city largely lacks a large, contiguous area of greens and blues. Having such a contiguous area directly translates into how urban an area feels, I think. Contrast LA's map to San Francisco's and you can see why lots of people think that SF feels more urban than LA.

[3rd&Brown]

LOL Houston.

On another note, is Fort Worth more walkable than Dallas?

[homebucket]

Originally Posted by Toasty Joe

SF

I wonder if there's some missing data here as the map for Berkeley and Oakland, and to a lesser extent Alameda, doesn't seem right.

[iheartthed]

Detroit + Ann Arbor

[jbermingham123]

Based on the rigorous analysis of.. my eyes.. if I had to rank order a top ten:

1. NYC
2. Philly*
3. Bay Area should be here; i know for a fact that the East Bay's data is wrong. (Berkeley students would probably die if they had to drive to get coffee)
4. Seattle*
5. Chicago*
6. --DC goes here?--
6. Portland
7. Boston*
8. LA
9. Denver
10. Miami

*Notes:

-Philly gets point for its widespread walkability, which spans the whole urban area. most of the pink areas are industrial (e.g. a lot of camden)

-Seattle, like Philly, gets points for its widespread walkability, and the relative walkability of the suburbs. Every residential area of the city is walkable; the pink areas within city limits are industrial zones and parks.

-Chicago loses a lot of points for the giant gaps in the south side, in what are decidedly residential areas. That said, if this map had been made 60 years ago the whole city would be blue. And if we chop off the south side for the sake of argument, then chicago would be #2, by a mile. The north side + downtown is comparable to Queens.

-Boston loses a lot of points for the unwalkability of its suburbs. Having lived in the Boston area, this map definitely matches with my experience. If youre not in the city limits (which is a tiny area) or in cambridge, then youre kinda SOL. Waltham on that map is rated WAY too high, imo.



Disputes welcome



Also, FWIW, I think Houston's data is wrong. In my very limited experience there, there are certain pockets (for example, around Rice University), where it is quite walkable with lots of amenities

[Steely Dan]

These can't be at the same scale, cuz if so, Chicago seems to utterly annihilate every non-NYC city.

Chicago is obviously near the top of the list, but it can't be that big of a lead, can it?

[jbermingham123]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

These can't be at the same scale, cuz if so, Chicago seems to utterly annihilate every non-NYC city.

Chicago is obviously near the top of the list, but it can't be that big of a lead, can it?

I dont think theyre on the same scale. Boston, especially, seems way zoomed in

Chicago indeed looks quite good on these maps. it has fairly widespread walkability in its suburbs. If not for the huge gaps in the south side it would blow everything else out of the water.

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by jbermingham123

If not for the huge gaps in the south side it would blow everything else out of the water.

If these maps are actually to the same scale, and if the data is accurate, Chicago blows everyone else away (sans NYC), Southside gaps included. The scale of the Northside/inner burbs would be on another level.

But I don't trust the scales here.

[tech12]

Originally Posted by homebucket

I wonder if there's some missing data here as the map for Berkeley and Oakland, and to a lesser extent Alameda, doesn't seem right.

Yeah, something's wrong. Oakland and Berkeley are some of the most walkable cities in the Bay Area, outside of SF. Especially their downtown areas. They shouldn't look too different from how SF does on the map, with the exception of the hill areas. It looks like the map doesn't have any data for Alameda county.

Another weird thing, is that the map seems to omit the southeast corner of SF (Sunnydale/Visitacion valley). There's light rail, multiple bus lines, and plenty of businesses, corner markets, etc, within that area, and it's right next to one of the largest parks in the city, yet it's all colored grey.

[bilbao58]

It seems to be suggesting there are no parks in Houston... which is ludicrous. The first map is with is with parks added. The second is with parks not added.

[jbermingham123]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

If these maps are actually to the same scale, and if the data is accurate, Chicago blows everyone else away (sans NYC), Southside gaps included. The scale of the Northside/inner burbs would be on another level.

But I don't trust the scales here.

I dont trust the scales either. Philly seems quite zoomed out, Boston zoomed in.

Philly proper is almost entirely covered by green and blue, which extends out into its suburbs. Very little pink, except in industrial areas.

Chicago proper extends below the bottom of the map here, with lots of pink pockets in the south side.



It would be cool to somehow cross-referennce these maps with population density, to get a sense of *how many* people live in blue/green areas vs pink, and then rank order the cities by % of population in walkable areas. In this case, Chicago would easily be #2

[Toasty Joe]

Chicago was the first one I searched/screenshot so likely not as accurate of a measuring system... which was me just zooming out until the individual data points disappeared lol

And agreed there seems to be missing data for the East Bay and even parts of Marin (where I'm from).

Originally Posted by iheartthed

Detroit + Ann Arbor

Worth noting the default filters are supermarkets and libraries, which I didn't feel captured enough to determine if a place was walkable. There's a bunch of options, but the more obscure ones are less likely to return an accurate map. Here's what it looks like with the same filters as my screenshots:

[jbermingham123]

For some reason, if you deselect "Parks" from the criteria, and replace it with "Bars", DC data appears, which somehow makes sense.

sorry for the small size

[badrunner]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

If these maps are actually to the same scale, and if the data is accurate, Chicago blows everyone else away (sans NYC), Southside gaps included. The scale of the Northside/inner burbs would be on another level.

But I don't trust the scales here.

You can see the half mile street grid in the Chicago and LA maps and it's clearly not the same scale.

[wwmiv]

What selection of criteria is applicable is going to differ depending on the city. For Austin, I’d de-select supermarkets (this adds a lot of totally unwalkable suburban turf) and restaurants (same thing) and replace them with bars and bookstores.

[tech12]

The map seems a bit glitched. When you have too many categories or certain categories selected for display (parks and grocery stores, for me), then it shows large areas as grey.

So I removed parks, and replaced grocery stores with convenience stores, and now the greyed out areas in the Bay Area are showing up in a much more accurate-looking way:




The South and North Bay:

[badrunner]

The NYC and Chicago maps are roughly same scale, and the LA and SF maps are also roughly the same scale.

[wwmiv]

Originally Posted by tech12

The map seems a bit glitched. When you have too many categories or certain categories selected for display (parks and grocery stores, for me), then it shows large areas as grey.

Is this a glitch or a feature? What tracts get highlighted depends on if those tracts meet all of the criteria you selected.

If you have more things selected, by definition fewer tracts will meet the criteria and be considered walkable (hence more grey).

[tech12]

Originally Posted by wwmiv

Is this a glitch or a feature? What tracts get highlighted depends on if those tracts meet all of the criteria you selected.

If you have more things selected, by definition fewer tracts will meet the criteria and be considered walkable (hence more grey).

It's definitely glitched, when you have too many categories, or certain categories selected. The amenities still show up in the greyed-out areas, as markers, but the heat map doesn't load in.

edit:there are plenty of missing markers as well (for all the parks near me in Oakland, for example)

edit #2 maybe you're right. I was thinking it was also measuring proximity to other census tracts with the relevant amenities, but maybe it's just the amenities within a specific tract.