[getsmart-l] "a neighbourhood dense enough not to rely completely on the car"

[John O'Gorman]

DR. GRIDLOCK 
Does your neighbourhood pass the Popsicle test? 

JEFF GRAY  ?Globe and Mail Aug. 27/07

?For a neighbourhood to be considered friendly to pedestrians, planners in the new urbanist school believe, it must pass the "Popsicle test." 

Essentially, a neighbourhood must be planned so that an eight-year-old can walk to a corner store without crossing major roads, buy a Popsicle and get back home before it melts. 

If little Mackenzie can do that, you live in a neighbourhood dense enough not to rely completely on the car. Which means you may drive less, and you may even take public transit to work, sparing the environment and easing congestion. 

If you don't have an eight-year-old or some spare change for a Popsicle, there is Walk Score (www.walkscore.com). a new website that measures walkability using the miracle of a Google "mash-up," in which the search engine's wizardry is put to new uses. 

You simply type in your address, and the website calculates how close you are to a list of amenities such as shops and restaurants, calculating a score out of 100 using a patent-pending algorithm. 

A score above 90 means you live in a "walker's paradise," the site says, where "most errands can be accomplished on foot and many people get by without owning a car." The corner of Bloor and Yonge streets hits a 95, while the middle of Manhattan scores 100. 

A score above 70 is deemed "very walkable" where it is "possible to get by without owning a car." Scores below 50 mean your Popsicle is sure to melt before you get home. 

The old city of Toronto's traditional grid of residential streets is, for the most part, thoroughly Popsicle-tested, and does fairly well on Walk Score. Passing grades in the postwar suburbs and much of the even-more sprawling 905 belt are of course less likely, although denser new urbanist-style developments are more common now. 

Matt Lerner, a Seattle computer programmer who helped develop Walk Score based on research by a local environmental think tank, said the site has hosted about a million searches in its first month - an amazing number with no promotion, just lots of chatter among bloggers. Much of the interest has come from environmentalists, real estate agents and urban planners. 

"I think it has really struck a chord with people," said Mr. Lerner, who works for entrepreneur and former Microsoft executive Mike Mathieu, creating websites to promote environmental issues. 

Making money is not the prime objective, Mr. Lerner said, although the site does have advertising. Plans are in the works to refine the calculations and include things such as street width and access to public transit. 

Admittedly, the site doesn't really tell us that much we don't already know. Random suburban Toronto-area addresses I tried had scores in the low 40S, 30S or lower, although some near older main streets fared above 50. (The site also cheekily lets you search a collection of celebrity addresses: U.S. President George W. Bush's Crawford Ranch in rural Texas scores a zero, for example.) 

While Toronto's real estate market already charges a premium for housing in walkable downtown neighbourhoods, there is still something appealing about Mr. Lerner's next project, which will help real estate websites include Walk Scores in their listings, alongside the number of bedrooms and the size of the yard. 

Perhaps smart urban planners - especially those in the suburbs - will one day set five-year targets for increased Walk Scores. Or perhaps the Toronto Transit Commission could demand, before it builds pricey subways into the 905 area, that the surrounding new development be dense enough to generate a minimum Walk Score, and thus a critical mass of new transit riders. 

Last week, in discussing the requirements for Toronto's new fleet of streetcars, I misstated the gradient of the Bathurst Street hill, which for about 300 metres north of Davenport Road is the system's steepest. It is 8 per cent, not 11 per cent. 

Dr. Gridlock appears Mondays. 
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