(And El Paso, Too, But We Don’t Care About Them*)
Walk Score‘s oft-cited walkability index rates the pedestrian-friendliness of locations throughout the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and even provides on its website easily-readable green-to-red heat maps for U. S. addresses. It gives Detroit a score of 50 out of 100, ranking our city at #22 in the 50 largest municipalities in the United States. Not bad, right?
Except, as cycling blog m-bike.org observes, Walk Score is broken.
One glance at the Walk Score website’s map view, and it is quite obvious that something has gone terribly wrong with the organization’s assessment of our city:
Green=good, red=bad. Screenshot: www.walkscore.com