Visualizing Walk Score in 3D

Downtown Chicago Walk Score

Walk Score helps people determine the walkability of a location. Walk Score is a value between 0 and 100 that measures the walkability of many address locations around the world. Real estate websites regularly use Walk Score as a trusted metric for how friendly pedestrian access is to a property for sale or lease. The value is usually included as a line item on the listing sheet:

But how is that number meaningful in a comparative building context? The city heat maps produced by Walk Score cover a large area and are not very helpful at understanding how buildings in a local neighbourhood vary by walkability. Below are examples of two very walkable cities, Chicago and Toronto, as seen on the Walk Score website:

Toronto Walk Score, from Walkscore.com

Chicago Walk Score, from Walkscore.com

To better understand this data and to make it actionable for real estate decisions, we need a visualization at a building level. As seen below, with the help of the Walk Score API and the Cube Cities platform, we can explore Walk Score data at the building level and reveal the walkability secrets of a neighbourhood.

Downtown Toronto Walk Score

Downtown Calgary Walk Score

Downtown Boston Walk Score

This is another example of how Cube Cities can leverage its geospatial coordinate platform to visualize a common web service such as Walk Score. To see more visuals of Walk Score with Cube Cities for most any other city in the world please contact us.