Walk Score App Shows Walking Score to Nearest Amenities

Seattle-based “civic software” developer Front Seat has launched City-Go-Round, a Web site that helps visitors find public transit apps for their smartphone or computer.

Walk Score, available as an iPhone app, assigns “walkability” scores for homes and neighborhoods based on the availability of nearby amenities. The app is one of 64 transit apps featured on City-Go-Round.

Walk Score was recently updated to provide public transit data from more than 80 transit agencies. When users look up an address on Walk Score, it displays nearby bus and train stops, if a city provides open transit data of course. City-Go-Round uses open data from 89 transit agencies in the U.S., Canada and Australia.In an attempt to get more transit agencies to provide open data in the Google Transit Feed Specification format, City-Go-Round also lists 669 transit agencies it says have not made their data available.

Front Seat offers an API that will automatically generate walkability scores for listings published by real estate sites including ZipRealty.com, Windermere Real Estate, Zillow.com, and Cyberhomes. Each one point increase in a property’s Walk Score was associated with an increase in value of $500 to $3,000, depending on the market. Walk Score generates a score from zero to 100, with a score of 70 or above indicating a neighborhood where it’s possible to get by without a car .

Living in Calgary, I figured I’d give this app a shot, considering it was created by a US based company. And to my surprise (I had to change the title of the post because of it) there were NO Bus Stops or Train icons on my map. Only locations for stores, schools, shops, malls, even parks. So all in all, this app is only useful if you’d like to see what your “Walking Score” is for your house. This would be useful if your selling, as I mentioned above, but otherwise it’s pretty useless. Let me know what you think? My walk score was 34. I have no idea if that is good or not, but it did tell me I would need a car to go anywhere. Which isn’t really true.

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