The Short Story
The Walkability Assessment Map (WAM) is designed for small communities with small budgets that want to improve their pedestrian environment. Using freeware, WAM was developed to be easy to use and powerful, utilizing crowdsourced data to identify walkability issues that lead to actionable solutions.
The Long Story
In response to a small town’s request to assess its walkability, we developed a simple, free online tool that democratizes the evaluation process and provides a crowd-sourced pedestrian analysis.
Like many small towns in Canada, this town aimed to improve walkability for its growing senior population by evaluating existing conditions. Having carried out research on walkability and developed walkability tools, we assumed that a tool suitable for the needs and budget of a small community would be available. However, further research confirmed that these tools were insufficient or unaffordable. This presented us with an opportunity to create something tailored to smaller communities. WAM not only identifies walkability issues at a pedestrian scale but does so in a simple, accessible, and equitable way to generate actionable initiatives.
Prevailing walkability assessments fall into two categories: high-level, top-down analyses or standardized audits of the built environment. The first oversimplifies the pedestrian experience, ignores the intangible (e.g., aesthetics, vibrancy), and lacks practical application for improving walkability. The second is cumbersome to carry out, fails to tap into local knowledge, and relies on the interpretation of a few observers.
Only recently has the conventional definition of a walkable distance (5-minute radius) been further refined. This has resulted in finer-grained definitions and tools that reflect the actual pedestrian experience rather than a desktop analysis. For example, Walk Appeal advances the idea that a comfortable walking distance is not a constant but a variable and that the distance we are willing to walk depends on the quality of the environment along the way. This concept demystifies why the same person who drives 100m between big box stores in Houston will walk a mile to the market in Heidelberg. It is at this level of assessment that our tool is aimed – operationalizing that concept while utilizing community input.
Effectively matching the level of analysis to the project budget proved to be a catalyst for this project: We set the challenge of carrying out a crowd-sourced analysis on a small budget – using community input to validate our analysis. In doing so, we could strike a balance between improving the community engagement process, gaining sufficient data, and validating our evaluation.
WAM uses a simple, free online map that allows community members to identify issues by location, comment, and add pictures. Citizens thus verify our analysis in an innovative way and, perhaps more importantly, prioritize issues through the geographic clustering of responses on the map.
The benefits of WAM are several: a) a simple, online format reaches a wider demographic than traditional engagement; b) use of open source software and crowd- sourced data at a minimal cost democratizes the walkability assessment; and c) clustered and geo-located data identifies key actionable issues to target.
