Yesterday, Walk Score unveiled new heat maps for the 2,500 largest American cities, providing a quick way to get a sense of where cities are most walkable.
The heat-map feature builds on Walk Score’s walkability scoring tool and its transit score. These maps are helpful in that they get people thinking about walkability and density, although they have been critiqued for being limited in their usefulness because they don’t measure things like how busy a road is, whether it has sidewalks or crosswalks (and thus is actually walkable), or how desirable nearby amenities might be. Walk Score is working on improving the tool’s limitations. In the meantime, it helps get us thinking about the important issues of walkability and our built environment.