Austin's walkability rating not the best

[JAM]

IF you walk around Austin enough, you'll realize its not very walkable. If you drive around Austin most of the time, you'll never know the difference......

---------------------

For Austin Mayor Lee Leffingwell, and pretty much everyone else in the room, it was a "huh?" moment.

The Transit Working Group, a civic concoction that is spending a few months considering what sort of rail lines might make sense for this area, was batting around the merits and deficits of an Austin streetcar line in mid-December. Travis County Commissioner Sarah Eckhardt said that from a "completely, self-serving, myopic standpoint," she wanted to know how such a line would work for the lower-paid Travis County government workers who might be predisposed to use transit.

Oh, Capital Metro board member John Langmore said, I thought you were wondering how it might work for you personally. No, no, Eckhardt said.

"This is totally academic to me. I live at 10th and Lorrain. I can walk to work. When you go on the walkability index for me, I have a 78."

Go on the ... what?

"I didn't know there was one," Leffingwell said. Based on the mumbles and chuckles around the table, this was new territory for most of the political and civic leaders on the panel.

Turns out there is a website called Walk Score, sponsored as best I can tell by the Seattle-based Sightline Institute, where some good folks have spent a whole lot of time evaluating how "walkable" cities are. Go to walkscore.com, and you'll see what looks like a weather map for Austin (and other cities as well), with greens and oranges and yellows showing how every neighborhood in Austin scores. Green, you won't be surprised to hear, indicates good in walkability terms (70 to 100 percent).

And, again, no surprise, most of that green is downtown and neighborhoods close to downtown

....


Austin is car-dependent.

The city overall scored a 46.7, putting us 31st among the 50 largest U.S. cities. (The site doesn't give a score for smaller cities like Round Rock or West Lake Hills, although it does compute scores for addresses in smaller cities.) Houston, so often cited as the epitome of car-centricity, came in at 23rd with a 49.8 score. Even Dallas bested Austin, with a 46.9 for 30th place. Grrrr ... New York, as dense a place as you'll find in the U.S., finished first with an 85.3 score, with some neighborhoods in Manhattan scoring as high as 100.

http://www.statesman.com/news/local/...t-2104186.html