What's your walk score??: Web-based neighborhood walkability assessment for health promotion and disease prevention

摘要

The assessment of neighborhood built environments, especially neighborhood walkability (a measure of how friendly a neighborhood is to walking), has been a recent focus of public health research and practice.1 Although there are a variety of web-based tools that can evaluate neighborhood walkability, in the 21st century, none has arguably received as much attention as Walk Score? (www.walkscore.com). In brief, Walk Score permits users to assess the walkability (a novel index based on distance to various amenities including parks and stores) of their specific street address, broader neighborhood, and overall city. The Walk Score for my present address in Boston MA is 98 (of 100). This means that I live in a "Walker's Paradise," which is a highly walkable neighborhood. Walk Score provides walkability information for all of the U.S. and several international addresses such as in Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand.Although there is a need for Walk Score validation work in rural and international contexts, existing validation work strongly suggests that Walk Score is good at measuring various neighborhood walkability features across geographies,2"5 bolstering the use of the website in neighborhood walkability assessment. To date, only one study has validated Transit Score?, and that study demonstrates the utility of the Transit Score.5 Further, although validation studies have evaluated the Walk Score, none has evaluated the "Street Smart" Walk Score, an updated Walk Score metric that accounts for pedestrian friendliness factors—namely, walking distances, intersection density, and average block length. Walk Score is correlated with neighborhood-level crime2 but does not currently account for crime, neighborhood aesthetics, weather, traffic, or topography—all of which may influence walking in a neighborhood. I suspect that the Walk Score developers will enhance the algorithm in years to come to address its current limitations.There are other web-based walkability measures, including Walk Shed (www.walkshed.org) and Walko-nomics (www.walkonomics.com), but in many ways they are much more limited than Walk Score. For instance, Walk Shed is currently available in only two U.S. cities: New York City and Philadelphia.