How Walkable Is Your Neighborhood?

89 for Comm Ave near Mass Ave.

I'm pissed....I thought I lived in a walker's paradise....I demand a recount!
 
my dorm room got a 10

current home address got a 13

old house in quincy got a 37 (i think it should be better, everythings within walking/biking distance - convenience stores, bus stops, packies, etc)

old apartment in holbrook got a 30
 
This is amusing..my house in Brookline got a 52. My friend's house up the street got a 73. My other friend further down the street got an 80.

But then again, a closer look reveals that the nearest supermarket, coffee shop and school were not entered into the database.
 
My house in Needham - 31
Needham zip code (centering on the town common) - 53
My old zip code on the Upper West Side, Manhattan - 96

The West Village in Manhattan (Jane Jacobs' neighborhood) gets a 100.
 
Kenmroe Square = 84

My current location in California gets a 22, but it doesnt take into account the inability of strolling when its 110f
 
Just to demonstrate how listings-dependent this is, London (Westminster) and Paris (Ille de la Cite) both got 55.
 
JaysonL said:
95 for my place in Central Square (University Park). Pretty much everything is within walking distance--Star Market, Target
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Target? in Cambridge? Where?
 
Yay

My place in the South End got a 98.

Guess the absence of strip clubs hurts us.
 
If proximity to movie theatres and bookstores is important to the ranking, most Boston neighborhoods are going to suffer.

The only two movie theatres wholly within Boston city limits are the Regal Fenway and Loews Boston Common. Circle Cinema straddles the Boston-Brookline boundary.

As for bookstores, we've got a big B&N in the Pru and another in Kenmore Square; a Borders in Downtown Crossing and another in Back Bay; Trident on Newbury Street; and a scattering of used bookstores from Downtown through Back Bay to Kenmore/Fenway. Beyond that, I think the only other bookstores within city limits are in Allston, JP, and Roslindale (and I'm not sure about Allston).

(Further discussion of bookstores should be moved here.)
 
Ron,

Technically, the Target is in Somerville on the fringe of Union Square. Still able to walk there though from CS (don't have much choice since I don't own a car).
 
Times OnLine said:
Walking to the shops ?damages planet more than going by car?
Dominic Kennedy

Walking does more than driving to cause global warming, a leading environmentalist has calculated.

Food production is now so energy-intensive that more carbon is emitted providing a person with enough calories to walk to the shops than a car would emit over the same distance. The climate could benefit if people avoided exercise, ate less and became couch potatoes. Provided, of course, they remembered to switch off the TV rather than leaving it on standby.

The sums were done by Chris Goodall, campaigning author of How to Live a Low-Carbon Life, based on the greenhouse gases created by intensive beef production. ?Driving a typical UK car for 3 miles [4.8km] adds about 0.9 kg [2lb] of CO2 to the atmosphere,? he said, a calculation based on the Government?s official fuel emission figures. ?If you walked instead, it would use about 180 calories. You?d need about 100g of beef to replace those calories, resulting in 3.6kg of emissions, or four times as much as driving.

?The troubling fact is that taking a lot of exercise and then eating a bit more food is not good for the global atmosphere. Eating less and driving to save energy would be better.?

Mr Goodall, Green Party parliamentary candidate for Oxford West & Abingdon, is the latest serious thinker to turn popular myths about the environment on their head.

Catching a diesel train is now twice as polluting as travelling by car for an average family, the Rail Safety and Standards Board admitted recently. Paper bags are worse for the environment than plastic because of the extra energy needed to manufacture and transport them, the Government says.

Fresh research published in New Scientistlast month suggested that 1kg of meat cost the Earth 36kg in global warming gases. The figure was based on Japanese methods of industrial beef production but Mr Goodall says that farming techniques are similar throughout the West.

What if, instead of beef, the walker drank a glass of milk? The average person would need to drink 420ml ? three quarters of a pint ? to recover the calories used in the walk. Modern dairy farming emits the equivalent of 1.2kg of CO2 to produce the milk, still more pollution than the car journey.

Cattle farming is notorious for its perceived damage to the environment, based on what scientists politely call ?methane production? from cows. The gas, released during the digestive process, is 21 times more harmful than CO2 . Organic beef is the most damaging because organic cattle emit more methane.

Michael O?Leary, boss of the budget airline Ryanair, has been widely derided after he was reported to have said that global warming could be solved by massacring the world?s cattle. ?The way he is running around telling people they should shoot cows,? Lawrence Hunt, head of Silverjet, another budget airline, told the Commons Environmental Audit Committee. ?I do not think you can really have debates with somebody with that mentality.?

But according to Mr Goodall, Mr O?Leary may have a point. ?Food is more important [to Britain?s greenhouse emissions] than aircraft but there is no publicity,? he said. ?Associated British Foods isn?t being questioned by MPs about energy.

?We need to become accustomed to the idea that our food production systems are equally damaging. As the man from Ryanair says, cows generate more emissions than aircraft. Unfortunately, perhaps, he is right. Of course, this doesn?t mean we should always choose to use air or car travel instead of walking. It means we need urgently to work out how to reduce the greenhouse gas intensity of our foodstuffs.?

Simply cutting out beef, or even meat, however, would be too modest a change. The food industry is estimated to be responsible for a sixth of an individual?s carbon emissions, and Britain may be the worst culprit.

?This is not just about flying your beans from Kenya in the winter,? Mr Goodall said. ?The whole system is stuffed with energy and nitrous oxide emissions. The UK is probably the worst country in the world for this.

?We have industrialised our food production. We use an enormous amount of processed food, like ready meals, compared to most countries. Three quarters of supermarkets? energy is to refrigerate and freeze food prepared elsewhere.

A chilled ready meal is a perfect example of where the energy is wasted. You make the meal, then use an enormous amount of energy to chill it and keep it chilled through warehousing and storage.?

The ideal diet would consist of cereals and pulses. ?This is a route which virtually nobody, apart from a vegan, is going to follow,? Mr Goodall said. But there are other ways to reduce the carbon footprint. ?Don?t buy anything from the supermarket,? Mr Goodall said, ?or anything that?s travelled too far.? dkennedy@thetimes.co.uk
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Well, that settles it. I'm going to move out to the boonies, buy a 5 acre plot of land and SUV and drive everywhere!
Or as someone on Fark pointed out:
Thank god we have self-constructing cars and self-extracting fossil fuels or the math wouldn't work out.

How's Rupert working out for you, London?
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I'm sorry, but that sounds like something I might read in the Onion. If I don't exercise, I won't eat? If I do exercise, I have to eat meat?
 
I think they are trying to say that getting more people fat will get more people to die from obesity related disease. With more people dying, then the damage done by human will be lowered. :wink:
 
I've heard at least one devout environmentalist consider exercising less in order to reduce his impact on the planet by reducing the amount of food he needs to function. I don't know about my neighbors, but I live in a walkable neighborhood because it is fun, convenient, lively and allows me to avoid the expense and trouble of car ownership. Probably like the high majority of Americans, I don't give much thought to environmental issues. By most accounts my lifestyle is low-impact in that regard, compared to my peers. If the kind of neighborhood I live in turned out to have a high relative environmental impact, it wouldn't phase me.
 
In the end, wouldn't the very most fuel efficient thing to do be to make every single person live in one gigantic apartment building right next to one gigantic grocery store? I guess we're already trying that out by Alewife!
 
^^ Only if there was a gigantic organic farm right next door!
 
The sums were done by Chris Goodall, campaigning author of How to Live a Low-Carbon Life, based on the greenhouse gases created by intensive beef production. ?Driving a typical UK car for 3 miles [4.8km] adds about 0.9 kg [2lb] of CO2 to the atmosphere,? he said, a calculation based on the Government?s official fuel emission figures. ?If you walked instead, it would use about 180 calories. You?d need about 100g of beef to replace those calories, resulting in 3.6kg of emissions, or four times as much as driving.
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There's no way I'm giving up my daily 3-mile walk for beef!

Seriously though, the idea of having to "replace" that 180 calories is a false choice. The city dweller would simply be maintaining a healthy body weight, while the suburbanite continues to steadily bloat. But we all know that. Meanwhile, how many shitheads out there have just read this article, harrumphed, and neatly stored this idea away in their minds for the next argument over the Thanksgiving dinner table?
 
If you have ever seen the ginormous feed lots out west then you know that this guy may have a point. Although that isn't going to stop me from walking OR eating beef.
 
He would have a point if there really was a correlation between how much people ate and how much they walk. In fact I'd guess that people who tend to walk, probably consume no more than or even fewer calories than those who live a sedentary lifestyle.
Plus this guy completely fails to take into account the amount of energy that goes into manufacturing cars plus extracting and transporting fuel.
 
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