Grantee Profile
Front Seat’s Walk Score
Every year, one out of six Americans relocates to a new residence. Each of these moves provides an opportunity for a household to settle in a neighborhood that encourages walking and has more transportation options—a neighborhood that offers multiple benefits for individuals, the community and our planet.
More walkable neighborhoods can
- help households become less automobile-dependent
- reduce auto-related deaths
- lower household transportation costs
- decrease greenhouse gas emissions
- enhance health (residents of walkable neighborhoods weigh seven pounds less on average than residents of less-walkable neighborhoods)
- offer higher long-term home values (homes in walkable neighborhoods retain their value better than homes in more auto-dependent areas)
As part of its Innovations for a Metro Nation exploration, the Rockefeller Foundation has provided support for the trailblazing efforts of Front Seat, a civic, mission-driven software company and incubator. Through this grant, the Foundation is helping Front Seat's Walk Score™ project provide more accurate data to enable people to make better decisions as they consider the location of their next home. The grant is also helping to make Walk Score suitable for use in urban planning research and public policy decisions related to reducing vehicle miles traveled (VMT).
“We believe walkable neighborhoods are one of the simplest and most effective ways to halt climate change, improve our health, and strengthen our communities,” says Mike Mathieu, founder and Chairman of Front Seat. “Our vision is a Walk Score for every property listing--3 br, 2 ba, Walk Score: 84--so that walkability and transportation costs become a key part of choosing where to live.”
Front Seat has expanded Walk Score to incorporate public transit (starting with the 40 transit agencies that distribute public data feeds about their services). This lets households visualize nearby bus, train or subway stops as walking destinations in their own right.
Mathieu explains that “walkability is a great shorthand for the characteristics of a vibrant neighborhood—healthier communities, mixed-uses and more transportation options.” Both consumers and real estate professionals can use Walk Score’s objective measure of the benefits of walkability on community health and environmental impact.
Prior to Walk Score, the real estate industry used conflicting definitions of what constituted a walkable neighborhood. Did the provision of nature trails or parks in low-density, suburban-grade developments make these areas walkable? As far as reducing car use, were single-family subdivisions with sidewalks comparable to compact, mixed-use urban neighborhoods? Consumers had no independent gauge of the walkability of locations they were considering for their next move. They also did not understand how moving to a walkable neighborhood would help them lower their household transportation costs.
By using proximity to amenities (the leading predictor of the number of walk trips taken by any household) as its core measure, and by building its interface on Google Maps® with Google Local Search data, Walk Score provides a standardized, nationally-available and easily-accessible measure of walkability. Walk Score corrects the information asymmetry—presenting the concept of walkability together with an easy-to-understand metric by which consumers can evaluate each location. The Rockefeller Foundation grant also supports Front Seat's effort to release the Walk Score algorithm (http://www.Walk Score.org/) to the open-source community.
