walkable neighborhoods

I am a walker. I love to walk. I will walk anywhere. Parks, random neighborhoods in any city from industrial areas to out in the middle of nowhere. You see and observe things so much better when you walk. It’s endlessly fascinating and part of that fascination lately is the idea of living in a complete neighborhood, which is a neighborhood where you can walk to your basic daily needs. So I’d say within a 15 minute walking distance to a grocery store, a cafe, a library, and a park. It’s about a mile give or take. Your daily needs may include mass transit station, schools, community centers, entertainment and others.

Now that I have PD, it’s even more interesting to me as I think about my future health and how it may impact where or how I live. I live on a beautiful island where I can get to the big city, the beach or the mountains in less than 10 minutes and the weather is gorgeous all year long. But my neighborhood is also on a steep hill with no sidewalks so walking to any of these places is a challenge.

If in the future I have limitations on driving, living in a complete neighborhood would allow me to still enjoy these daily needs with more independence and more frequency. It would also provide more ways to get exercise, to be outside & to engage with others in my community. A complete neighborhood can also be in a big city or in a small town. It’s encouraging to see that some new communities are planning with this concept in mind and many existing communities are retrofitting areas to make them more walk and bike friendly.

Walk Score is a fun way to see the walk-ability of your neighborhood. You put in your address and it gives you a score out of a possible 100 and a break down. It works for the US, Canada, & Australia. Mine was a 23 out of 100 which is low. Do you live in a walk-able neighborhood and if so does it add a positive quality to your daily life?