Portland has the donuts, Seattle has the coffee and Vancouver, B.C. has the … sidewalks.
Walk Score, a Seattle-based company that promotes walkable neighborhoods, just ranked the most walkable cities in Canada and Vancouver, B.C. took the top spot with a “Walk Score” of 78. That beats out Seattle (74) and Portland (66) as the most walkable city in the Pacific Northwest. The heat map above shows which areas are best for walking.
Walk Score’s service assigns a score on a scale of 1 to 100 for every address in the U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand based on the proximity to amenities such as theaters, restaurants and transit. The company’s walkability ranking is the only international, quantitative ranking of walkability.
Seattle’s score of 74 ranks sixth in the U.S. New York and San Francisco are tied for first with a score of 85.
Walk Score was started by former All Star Directories CEO Mike Mathieu under the umbrella of Front Seat Software. The company delivers more than six million scores for apartment and home addresses per day across a network of more than 15,000 real estate sites. Research cited one point of Walk Score equaling $3,000 to home values.
Previously on GeekWire: Get to know your neighborhood: Walk Score unveils new crowd-sourced pictorial guides