What's the walkability score of your area?

I live in the Village of Milford in Michigan. The Village is only about 6,400 people in about 2,500 homes and probably covers not much more than a mile square. It has a well planned downtown area and development has been contained to two major roads - the Milford Road/GM Road corridor and the Commerce Rd corridor. One of the best features of Milford is that is a very walkable place to live. I've always known that and use it in all of my ads for Village homes that I sell. But, I wasn't sure how to compare it with other areas or how to measure just how walkable it was until today.

Based upon a story in one of the real estate news feeds that I get, I went to a site call http://www.walkscore.com/. I've already put links to it on all of my Web sites. This wonderful and free little site let's you put in your address or any address and then it returns a score of the "walkability" of that area. It uses Google Maps to find the things that you could walk to from the address that you gave it and then, using some highly complex algorithm it calculates the walkability score. Of course I used my Milford address first and got a score of 80 (out of the 100 possible top score). That's pretty good. I put in my old address over in Orchard Lake and got back a score of 11 - not good, which I knew already. Try it with your address to see what the walkability of your area is.

Walking is important for people of all ages, but as I get older it becomes more important for me, since it is one of the things left that I can still do. Of course I still play golf, but that is getting to more about the walking and less about the golf these days. Most people who come to Milford looking for a retirement place do so because they like the idea of being able to walk downtown. I must admit that I only live two blocks from downtown and yet I seldom walk there. I can, but I've chosen to limit my walking to trips out with the dog and maybe down to the drug store and back. My wife and I have walked downtown for dinner with friends a few times (they insisted). I've even walked to my doctors office, which is only three blocks away. Perhaps if I walked to more places in the Village I wouldn't have to walk to my doctor's office so often. I'll give that some thought! So, anyway, visit the walkscore site and let me know what you think of it. And if you're looking for a great place to live that is very walkable, give me a call and I'll find you a place in Milford.