You may or may not have noticed, but a couple days ago, a link appeared on the bottom bar of the listing bubbles referring to something called “Walk Score”.
Walk Score is a neat service from the good folks at Front Seat that summarizes how walkable a location is, and lets you see how far you need to travel from a location to meet various needs (groceries, gyms, restaurants, etc). From that, it gives you a score from 0-100 that summarizes how feasible it is to access everything on foot from there. If you don’t plan on having a car, you probably don’t want to live in a place that scores a 20…
When you click a Walk Score link, the bubble info will be replaced by a mini map and a browseable list of points of interest that highlights the location of those POIs on the map, along with the walkability score of that location.
Please let me know if you find this helpful, and what refinements you might find helpful. I’m planning on adding some other things with Walk Score, so any input is helpful. Send feedback to padmapper@gmail.com
Thanks everyone, and happy hunting.
Walk Score is genius!
Walkscore is great!
the only caveat: All food stores, for example, are treated equally. Maybe a separate category for bodegas/mini superrettes, etc.,etc., and supermarkets? gets cumbersome, I know, but if I’m walking, the distance to a supermarket counts alot more than the distance to an overpriced candy shop.
There are two things that would be useful here, the first being easier to implement than the first. PadMapper is great, but one thing I am looking for is its ability to find me apartments close to a possible location. While I can of course do this visually, it is often hard to estimate how far of a walk/drive/commute one place is to another.
The first way to fix this would be a simple option where you can specify and address and than just draw a bubble or filter results that are within some straight-line distance.
The second and totally awesome feature would be to utilize the walking/driving time information provided by google maps to filter results based on their proximity to a particular address in either walking or driving time.
Either of these fixes would make PadMapper absolutely perfect.