Comments on: Walkscore and the 5-, 10-, 20-minute Neighborhood

By: If You Subsidize It, They Will Come

If You Subsidize It, They Will Come — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 19:32:48 +0000

[...] to carry more fresh and nutritious food in under-served areas. If Allentown got serious about a 10-Minute Neighborhood plan, with the goal of enabling people to access all their basic needs within a 10 minute walk from [...]

By: My beautiful laundromat, grocer, library… « Belonging Community: Being at home in an urban neighbourhood

Sat, 24 Apr 2010 18:30:42 +0000

[...] neighbourhoods has focused on these dynamics. Chris Smith, for instance, cleverly describes his 5-, 10- and 20- minute neighbourhood in Portland Oregon. Green Changemakers offers tips regularly on “living responsibly.” [...]

By: Alexis Grant

Alexis Grant — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 23:59:27 +0000

I agree with Isaac. Before Portland, I used to live down in Menlo Park in the Bay Area, and worked in Sunnyvale. My little corner of Menlo Park was pretty suburban, but the town center was a pleasant 10-15 minute walk through the park (to 2 grocery stores, hardware store, restaurants, laundromat, library, train station, post office, etc). My office in Sunnyvale got the same walkscore (around 88 as I recall) and most of the same amenities (no hardware store) but it was an unpleasant experience of missing sidewalks and 4 and 6 lane arterials (all side streets were unconnected) to get to any of it, so people didn’t really walk much around there if they had any choice. The walking experience is a huge factor in whether people will walk, not just what they can walk to.

By: Chris Smith

Chris Smith — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 23:12:49 +0000

There are actually two. The one I was referring to is Phil’s Uptown Meat in the Uptown Shopping Center (Burnside/Westover).

There is also Chop, which is part of City Market at NW21st and Johnson. I classed City Market as a ‘specialty grocery’.

By: Lance P.

Lance P. — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 19:56:26 +0000

Can I have some details about this butcher you mention?

By: Cora Potter

Cora Potter — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 18:24:00 +0000

I think what Jacob’s is trying to say in that quote is that how we think about geographies needs to be adjusted – to remove cognitive boundaries – we need to be allowed to look at what is – what is needed and the actual preferred movements of people and their cultural affinities, in order to create a sense of place.

I don’t think she would argue that providing basic amenities (food access, health care access, transportation access, access to quality education, recreation and cultural *as defined by the population* activities etc.) within a distance that is easily accessible by “foot”, for any individual household, contradicts or negatively influences the natural evolution of a sense of place. The cultural and sub-cultural affinities that help differentiate places are a relativistic overlay on the structural basics – each area will react to and develop that basic amenity into something different, because they (the neighborhood/marketshed/affinity grouping …whatever) react to that introduction with different starting assumptions that are based on their shared values.

By: Richard

Richard — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 21:20:39 +0000

“… the conception of neighborhoods in cities is meaningless — so long as we think of neighborhoods as being self-contained units to any significant degree, modeled upon town neighborhoods.” –Jane Jacobs, The Death And Life Of Great American Cities

By focusing on building 20-minute neighborhoods, we are creating a quasi-provincial cluster of inefficiently linked mini-burbs, and not on creating a sustainable, efficient, and humane city. That I don’t see the appeal of 20-minute neighborhoods is mostly a matter of preference, but neither do I see the logic, if our goal is to create a city that’s green, clean, and whatever else.

By: Isaac

Isaac — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 17:26:54 +0000

As a follow up, although I think it’s pretty obvious from my previous post, that even if you can walk a relatively short distance to services, say five minutes, but it’s a miserable experience, most people with choice are not likely to do so.

By: Isaac

Isaac — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 17:20:10 +0000

The walk score is a neat concept but is fundamentlly flawed in that it can’t weigh the quality of the walking environment. Many very unwalkable places get high scores because they are in close proximity to many services but nobody would ever walk there.

Consider any residential subdivision that backs up to a major strip shopping center. There are lots of services but in order to walk there you have to exit the subdivision, most likely on the opposite side you want to be on, probably cross one or two high speed 4-6 lane arterials (ugly and unpleasant, if not dangerous to walk along), then walk through the enormous parking lot. You’re looking at an unpleasant 10-30 minute walk even though you might live a quarter mile away.

By: Anne Hawley

Anne Hawley — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 01:14:59 +0000

I agree that the 20-minute walk radius is probably not a practical measure, and that five or ten minutes makes more sense. Even as an avid walker, I’m likely to consider the car if I’m going to have to spend 40 minutes in transit for a cup of coffee.

I don’t know how Walkscore comes up with its numbers, but surely some destinations have a higher inherent walkscore value than others.

For instance, a video store no longer has any value to me (at any distance) whereas a good grocery store is very heavily weighted. My inner Northeast neighborhood improved exponentially when we got a Nature’s and a coffee place, but the marginal value of a take-and-bake pizza place was, for me, nil.

Of course, it’s different for everyone. But the grocery store and the coffee place alone turned my little corner of Sabin from feeling like a suburb to feeling like the city.