I live in a suburban subdivision that only exits onto a busy 5-lane highway. You can, by means of a few parking lots, make it to some quiet roads and a city “multi-use trail” network that goes nowhere, but going somewhere to fulfill an actual purpose* requires either a car or use of the highway berm (with no marked crosswalks or pedestrian signals at any intersection along the way). My grocery store is only about two miles away, but it’s more like four miles if you avoid the highway. (This is not, culturally, an area where bicyclists are seen as fully-legitimate road users.)
Walk Score of 74 - Very Walkable; Most errands can be accomplished on foot.
Transit Score of 50 - Good Transit; Many nearby public transportation options.
Bike Score of 97 - Biker’s Paradise; Flat as a pancake, excellent bike lanes.
“Flat as a pancake” - what else would you expect in southern Saskatchewan?
This sums up my area as well. I live in the western exurbs of the DFW area; biking or walking would be suicidal. I’ve heard of places back east that have cute little concrete roads made just for people, but I’ve rarely seen one. There was a movement a few years ago to put some of these in our area (IIRC, they called them “sidewalks”). The townspeople arose in fury at the thought of ruffians and vagabonds wandering at will across their property, so the project was voted down.
We have a transit score of zero, and walk score of 5. My kids’ high school is 2.3 miles away, and there are literally no sidewalks along the entire route. We had to get cars for both of them in order to safely make the 5 minute journey to school. My commute is about 20 miles each way, and there are few sidewalks and no bike lanes along the route. Even if they existed, the searing heat around here would make them unusable for most of the year.
I guess the answer is we don’t live “locally”. The closest grocery store is many miles away, so we keep extra fridges/freezers and buy two weeks of groceries each time. I spent some time in downtown Austin* last year, and I realized that, at 60, I had never read or used a bus schedule (it found it very confusing).
*Parking was nonexistent, so my truck was useless to me there.
I live in central Tel Aviv. I scored a 96 on the Walk Score, which seems about right, if maybe a bit low.
I work at home, and almost everything I need is within a half-hour walk. Supermarket and post office? Across the street. Shopping malls? 4 of them within 20 minutes. Movie theaters? Two mutiplexes and the cinemateque within 15 minutes. Restaurants, coffee shops and bars? Several hundred in walking distance. Train station, hospital? Both 20 minutes. Parks? At least a dozen off the top of my head, with the closest down the block. Beautiful sandy beaches? An easy 30-minute stroll. Basically, if I can’t walk there, it’s not worth my while.
I can’t justify owning a car… not that I could afford the parking.
I walk everywhere if possible, though public transport is quite convenient in Melbourne* - a tram stop is just half a block away at the moment. So I need a shopping centre/mall to be within a kilometre if possible, or a shopping strip at the least. Where I am now the shops are only a couple of blocks away, but there’s a huge mall about 25 minutes away, for things beyond what K-Mart and the supermarket can provide.
Because I don’t drive, such proximity is important to me wherever I choose to live. So far I’ve been mostly lucky, there’s always at the least a tram or train within reach if not an entire shopping street, though when I lived in Sydney* it was a bit further for me to go. Luckily I was working near the city so I could detour to the shops on the journey if necessary.
*Australia, for those who still don’t know where I live
It’s a quarter of a mile from the front door to the main road. The road is busy and has no footpaths. In places it’s inaccessible and you have to cross to the other side of the road. I walked it once with a pram and a toddler and I’ll never do it again. There’s no way to avoid that main road to leave the property, so I have been known to drive to the park and walk there.
It’s about 2 miles to the supermarket, 9 miles to my kids’ school and 7.3 miles to work. I drive everywhere. A town bus service was introduced last month but isn’t likely to be useful for our needs.
There are other parts of town that are better for walking. In a previous house I was a similar distance from the supermarket and sometimes walked there. I mostly drove because it wasn’t manageable to walk there and grocery shop without a home delivery service.
So now, I find myself curious about why you chose to live where you do - whether you HAVE to drive everywhere, you can walk/bike everywhere, or someplace in between?
A weird metric I often think of when thinking about a house is, “Is there ANYTHING you can walk to?” I often experience that in the suburbs around here. I’ll be at someone’s home and realize there is NOTHING I could walk to - the post office, to buy a loaf of bread… It always strikes me as a little odd because in the Chicago burbs you CAN find areas that are not so car dependent. I especially find it odd when someone lives somewhere like that that isn’t even close to their work.
It is a different matter if you choose to live further out - or those of you who appear to live on acreage in quite rural areas.
I was born and raised in Chicago near Belmont and Central. There were three grocery stores within walking distance, and every store imaginable within 1/2 mile. With the Belmont and Central busses running 24/7, my mom didn’t even have a driver’s license. So I see the appeal of that lifestyle as well.
Not passing judgment on anyone - just curious.
When my wife and I bought our current home, we felt a desire to never move again (barring unforeseen circumstances.) It gave us a good feeling to know that if weather is horrible, we could walk to the grocery store for staples. The local hospital is less than a mile away. Yet we can get on several main expressways in less than 5 minutes.
Our walking score is 4, which is surprisingly high. Looking into it, they are calling a nasty little six-pack shop a “restaurant” and they call a school bus stop a “school”.
It’s actually not that bad, but yeah, you really can’t walk to anywhere and back from where I live; it’s nearly 2 miles to the nearest business, and 2.5 miles to the local shopping center. However, that would be within bicycling distance for errands that didn’t involve transporting heavy loads. I just usually don’t think of bicycling there. I should.
There used to be a good car-repair place maybe a quarter-mile past the shopping center, and when I’d drip my car off there, I’d just toss my bike in the trunk, and ride it back home. Unfortunately, they’re no longer in business.
Living in the other Melbourne, it was easy to make the assumption of Australia, considering the public transportation here requires at least one transfer between hourly buses to get anywhere that is difficult to walk to (so possibly a 2-hour journey each way).
I have Cold Lake Provincial park a 5 minute bike ride from my house and most of the city is rideable for the summer months. Walking would be a real chore but we have a public transit system now and it’s free to ride. I have a 12 km ride to work and only minor hills so it’s tolerable, but my house sits at the top of the hill and the ride home requires a last push at the end of the day.
Walk Score for my neighborhood was 18. Most of the shopping would be a good half hour or more walk.
After living in urban sprawl (Atlanta and Miami) where you’re screwed if you don’t have a reliable car, I put a major premium on living close to work. Initially, I had no plans to walk to work. I just wanted a short, stress-free commute. But when I first moved here, I was lucky enough to land an apartment that was right at the upper end of “walking distance” (3.5 miles) from my office. One day I decided to hoof it by foot and I haven’t stopped. So when I starting looking for a house to buy, I decided that my top priority was finding a place no further than 3.5 miles away from downtown. I was pleased as punch to find a place that was 2.5 miles away.
The answer to the first question of the OP - How locally do you live? - is very. I rarely shop for anything outside of my town(population 50K+ in exurban Houston), and use locally owned businesses whenever practical. Groceries are closest at a national chain, and a regional chain a bit further away. I love my old-fashioned hardware store, but do have to use Lowe’s and Home Depot for some things(both in town).
The answer to the second part - Where do you bike/walk? - is nowhere to conduct business. I haven’t owned a bike since the early '70s. I do walk a lot - with my dog in the neighborhood and to go fishing every day or two near a boat ramp about a half-mile away. Every couple of weeks my SO and I paddle our kayaks about two miles to a restaurant for lunch. It’s not biking or walking, but it is exercise!
That walk-ability website gave me an 8. That suits me fine because where there are sidewalks and street lights and public buses there is less peace and quiet.
I have a walk score of 0. I live in a small town of 300 people. The closest place to get a loaf of bread or gallon of milk is 9 miles away. But that is a town of 1500 people and the grocery store there has a limited assortment and higher prices. So I usually grocery shop 30 miles away at a city of 10,000 where they have standard supermarkets and Walmart.
:smack:, so I walk everywhere (or have stuff delivered.)