A walkable future?
How walkable is your neighborhood in Bridgewater? You can get a rough idea from walkscore.com. Put in your address and it will calculate walking distances to basic services and stores. A couple of local examples: the neighborhoods close to Bridgewater town hall get a score of 68/100, “somewhat walkable.” The neighborhood around the Brethren church up on the hill is 20/100, “car-dependent.”
I mention this because our town will have some influence on how walkable we are in the future. What once was considered good development practice — large lots, wide roads leading to ever-larger arterial roads — are now known to be hostile to walkability. If the future development associated with the Bridgewater Bypass follows the car-bound model, we could see a major decrease in walkability. With different planning and zoning, we could do much better.
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April 18th, 2009 at 9:58 am
Mine is 31/100, yet I walk all over the place easily. Not sure I understand this exercise. No pun intended.
I am, however, an advocate of sidewalks. Realizing it would be a huge cost burden to the town and developers, I think we should have them at least on high traffic feeder streets in residential areas. I like the fact that residential developers now have to provide curb and gutters but would like to see the next step, sidewalks, be included.
April 18th, 2009 at 1:36 pm
mine rates 40 out of 100. car dependent it says. and while there is plenty of good walking territory around here i think the point is that it is hard to get regular business done on foot. for example. dicksons is a 35 minute roundtrip to pick up a prescription and iga is probably 50 minutes to pick up groceries.
April 20th, 2009 at 9:49 am
Zero! I WIN!!! I’m totally car dependent according to the site. Thank God for the rain and sun to grow my own food.
April 20th, 2009 at 1:04 pm
23 out of 100. Worst walkable urban area. “Car dependent”. Tell me something I don’t know.
April 20th, 2009 at 2:09 pm
Wow!! I got a 77 out of 100. “Very walkable”. Not surprising though. I live in a very residential part of Bwater with tons of things in close walking distance. I think the exercise does more of calculating how far you are from basic stores (grocery, gas, library, etc.) rather than calculating how well the roads are to walk on just for exercise and leisure.