Pittsburgh scores high on walkscore.com
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The South Side Flats makes the list as one of four "walker's paradise" neighborhoods in Pittsburgh.
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Thirty-six Pittsburgh neighborhoods rank as a "walker's paradise" or "very walkable" in a national analysis at walkscore.com, a site that today unveils an expanded view of how amenable American cities are to pedestrians.
The site, based in Seattle, promotes walkability as a reason to choose where you live and describes a "car-lite lifestyle" as most healthy.
It has featured only the 40 largest U.S. cities in its rankings to date but now will provide rankings for 2,500 cities, including Pittsburgh and places with as few as 10,000 residents.
Pittsburgh weighs in with 36 neighborhoods scoring 70 and above on a scale of 0-100. A walker's paradise score of 90-100 means residents do not need cars, and four Pittsburgh neighborhoods make the list: Central Business District, South Side Flats, North Oakland and Lower Lawrenceville.
The "very walkable" range of 70-89 captures neighborhoods in which most trips can be made on foot.
Josh Herst, walkscore.com's CEO, said the formula is based both on a range of amenities and closeness. An amenity within a quarter-mile gets the maximum number of points. The number of points declines as the distance approaches a mile. A mile or more is a zero-score amenity.
The walk scores are weighted by population density, based on the 2000 Census.
Rounding out the top 20, the "very walkable" neighborhoods are, in order, Bloomfield, Allegheny West, Uptown (Bluff), Oakland, Strip District, Allegheny Center, Shadyside, West Oakland, Polish Hill, Central Lawrenceville, Friendship, Crawford Roberts, Central North Side, East Allegheny (Deutschtown), East Liberty and Squirrel Hill North.
One surprise on the list is Polish Hill with just a handful of businesses and challenging sidewalk access to the Strip and Lawrenceville.
Mr. Herst said the walk score "measures proximity to amenities and has not taken topography or the aesthetics of the walk into consideration." Because walk scores are based on a crow's flight, he said, a neighborhood's score may be higher than merited if a highway, a cliff, a body of water or severed road connections are in the way of amenities.
Walkscore.com is refining the way it charts the pedestrian course to be more realistic, he said, calling the new measure "a street-smart walkscore."
First Published November 22, 2010 12:00 am
