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Originally Posted by SignalHillHiker
That said, I've been browsing every real estate listing in the core for nearly a year now as I prepare to buy a new home. The walk scores they give are consistently bad. My old house, for example, was literally kitty corner to a full-size grocery and the Walk Score said there was nowhere nearby to get groceries. There are houses that back on to some of the city's biggest junior and high schools in the core that say there are no schools nearby. I think they just don't have any idea what they're doing outside the major cities and kind of wing it, or automate it. Our population density in most of the downtown postal codes is 5-6K. That's enough to get above a walk score of 3-6, c'mon b'y. lol
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It's not some person scoring it. They are basically applying a bunch of filters to Google Maps (schools, hospitals, restaurants, community centres, clinics, etc) and then either measuring distances to the address you give them or to a 500' x 500' grid for the city or neighbourhood scoring.
It's never going to be a precise science. Not in the least because what everyone values is different. Like I said to someone123, I think the value is giving a relative idea of walkability. Where it's my quality of life sans car going to be higher? St. John's or Halifax or Quebec City?
More interesting would be what do you think the city could and should do to improve the score?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Nouvellecosse
Interesting that they would have Hfx at a higher transit score than 9 of the 12 largest municipalities and a higher walk score than 10 of the top 12. Especially having an average walk score higher than Toronto given that our municipality includes not only suburbia, but large rural areas as well. Makes me wonder how high the score would be if we had a small municipality that excluded most of that stuff like Victoria does.
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As per their methodology, they didn't weight low density neighbourhoods lower so that they didn't penalize a city for having lots of rural or uninhabited blocks in their boundary.
I'm actually not that surprised at how Halifax scored. I think it's a reflection of how dense a good chunk of Halifax proper is. The Toronto Star urban correspondent Christopher Hume once called Halifax the best urban city in Canada.
What might be interesting to see is how much the score changes over time as the city grows and sprawling subdivisions increase car dependency.