walksheds

There's a post on WorldChanging about walksheds -- the idea is based on the planning/architectural idea of a viewshed -- whatever is visible from some location. In analogy, a walkshed is whatever is considered walkable from some location. There are different rules of thumb. I've read that some planners use 5 minutes as the walkshed cutoff. Others use one mile, which, to me, sounds more reasonable. There must be lots of other variables, though: aesthetics, safety, topography (one mile of near vertical slogging in a harbour town like Halifax or Lunenburg would be more daunting than one mile on flat ground). The type of location would make a difference as well. Psychological factors like the number of turns in the route, the density of points of interest along the way, would also probably influence the size of a person's walkshed.

Google maps has an interesting function in which you can plug in some type of business and get a listing, ordered by increasing distance from a point of interest. Though there's much more to a walkshed than physical distance, here is an interesting comparison, using a one mile walkshed:

Where we are now:

Bakeries - 1
Beaches - 1
Museums - 1
Bookstores - 0
Restaurants - 0
Coffee houses - 0
Universities - 0


Where we're going next week:

Bakeries - 0
Beaches - 0
Museums - 1
Bookstores - 6
Restaurants -51
Coffee houses - 5
Universities - 2

Another way to look at walkability is to do a raw count of the number of businesses of any kind within a given distance of a defined location. There's a great post and lots of ideas at the Cascadia blog. In Canada, I have to use this tool, which gives me a choice of 1 or 2 km for my defined walkshed boundary. Using 2 km, I'm going from an index of 2 to an index of 2827.

Life will be different.