City a hit assessing homes' walking appeal
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Pittsburgh addresses are being searched more than any city in the state on a new Internet site that's showing up on more and more Realtors' blogs.
WalkScore.com, a tool for assessing the appeal of a home based on its walking distance to businesses and other points of interest, went online five months ago. The intention was to promote walkable living, said Matt Lerner, chief technical officer for Front Seat Management, the Seattle company that created it. In its first four weeks, he said, it spun out results to a million searches.
Addresses in Pennsylvania are the 15th most searched so far, and in the past month, Pittsburgh addresses have constituted the most of any city in the state, with 2,000 searches, he said.
The site may help prospective home buyers find a home, but it's also fun to put the house you intend to die in to the test. Based on variety and closeness of attractions, a score above 78 means you are very well served; above 90 means you probably don't need a car.
But there's a rub for cities with many dramatic breaks in their grids, like Pittsburgh. WalkScore does not account for topographical features. For scores to be wholly accurate, then, many area residents would have to plunge down a hillside or slalom around a blind curve, dash across a busy highway and walk on water to get to that attraction a half-mile away.
Mr. Lerner said WalkScore creators are still working out the bugs: "Naturally, there are unique things about certain cities that make them harder to score," he said.
WalkScore also doesn't know anything about neighborhood use patterns, so it doesn't discriminate against the city's nuisance bars, for instance, or hole-in-the-wall food boutiques most locals haven't heard of.
Among the criteria are proximity to groceries, restaurants, bars, coffee shops, libraries, schools, movie theaters, parks, gyms and stores that sell books, hardware, drugs, clothes and music.
This week, 17 Post-Gazette staffers tested their addresses against WalkScore's veracity and practicality.
The Mt. Lebanon residents among them were perplexed that their walkability score did not take into account the nearby restaurants on Washington Road but listed those on more distant Mt. Lebanon Boulevard.
Squirrel Hill residents were shocked to discover that under "movie theaters," the first listing -- which is supposed to be the closest -- is the Regent Square Theater. The Manor and the Squirrel Hill theater, which are closer to them, do not appear on any Squirrel Hill WalkScore report.
"The number one negative feedback we get is, 'Hey, you missed the grocery near my house,' or, 'That theater closed a year ago,' " said Mr. Lerner. "We depend on Google, and we're talking to them about stuff that is out of date or missing."
When you plug in your address, a house pops up on the map approximately where you live, then the map fills in with symbols, such as cutlery for restaurants. The symbols clustered most densely for colleagues from the South Side, Friendship and Shadyside. Their scores of 94, 88 and 85, respectively, were the highest of the staff who participated.
Mr. Lerner said WalkScore does not let density pull a score up. "We made the decision to not give people more points if they had more of something," he said. "There are small communities that are very walkable but may not be able to support three movie theaters." So one of everything is as good as three of everything.
Several staffers were surprised that transit stops, banks, post offices, medical buildings and cultural sites did not merit categories.
Columnist Brian O'Neill said PNC Park, the National Aviary and the Children's Museum are among the most important reasons his family lives in the North Side's Allegheny West. His wife, Betsy, said the list of restaurants supposedly closest to their home include "three places I'm afraid to go in. I think they need to update their restaurant list, and coffee shop list soon."
Business writer Bill Toland said most of the listings under "coffee shops" for his address on Mount Washington "are walkable if you take the incline" to the South Side. Yet, the Village Dairy, a Shiloh Street mainstay of many coffee drinkers on the mount, isn't even on the list.
Mr. Lerner said WalkScore's creators are discussing refinements so people can customize categories to see more of what they care about and less of what they don't.
Eric Miller, an East Allegheny Realtor, said one benefit to WalkScore.com is that lesser-known and less-touted neighborhoods can prove a better match for many consumers than neighborhoods to which real estate agents typically steer clients.
For whatever reason people choose walkable neighborhoods, Mr. Lerner said the pay-off goes deeper than convenience and self-interest.
"They are better for local businesses and for community, since people meet their neighbors when they walk. In fact, my brother is using WalkScore to find a neighborhood there. He just moved to Pittsburgh."
First Published December 20, 2007 12:00 am
