How Walkable Is Your House?

Gotta love the power of the mash-up. Here's a neat little website that lets you measure how "walkable" your house (or any other address) is: That is, checking how close you are to critical (and not-so-critical, but important) services like grocery stores, restaurants, parks, schools, and libraries.

Give Walk Score a try and you might be surprised at what you'll find. I had no idea, for example, that Munchkinland Day Care was a mere 0.21 miles from me, or that there was such a thing as Billy Goat Hill Park, only 0.62 miles away.

While it's handy to check out how your current home ranks, Walk Score is more useful, I think, for scoping out places you might want to move to. When you're looking around at a new place to live, it can be hard to figure out whether you'll be able to walk for coffee or if you're going to have to haul out the Buick and drive to Starbucks instead. Even if you're just moving around in your home town, the only way to really know how close services are to the place is to drive around and hope you spot everything.

The data isn't perfect (the nearest listed grocery store to Sears Tower is "Amin Candy Store;" its nearest library is "Ernst & Young.") But the 15 seconds it will take you to type in your address are definitely a small price to pay for a few minor inaccuracies. Give Walk Score a try and see how your neighborhood measures up.

UPDATE: The site is very slow today (7/18/2007). If you can't get in now, bookmark this page and try again later. Sorry!

LINK: Walk Score