Walkability for Everyone
Walkability is a relatively new concept that focuses on determining if a community or neighbourhood is pedestrian friendly (see Walk Score as a Google Map mashup that is a really cool application). As part of this measure, features that are measured include things like sidewalk continuity, population and employment density, land use mix, safety and security and a few other factors. However, although there is mention of accessibility for things like safety at crosswalks, there is very little mention of accessibility.
The “everyone challenge” is to embed factors that are relevant to people with disabilities, seniors, families with small children, etc. The current approach basically gives a neighbourhood credit for simply having a resource. If there is a recreation centre within a mile of a community, it would score points for that. For the other 20 – 40% of the population where this might not be enough it doesn’t take into consideration whether or not the building is accessible, whether or not there are inclusive programs and services and whether there are accessible paths from residential areas to accessible destinations (resources that meet the daily needs of citizens).
More work needs to be done to determine if the existing measures are the right ones or the measures are accurate for everyone while still being feasible to assess. The walkability scores you will find on the Internet leverage easy to access information from GIS (Geographic Information Systems) databases. This approach uses this data to develop proxy scores for walkability and ideally similar approaches can be found that can consider accessibility and inclusion.
More to come…