League staff has shared information about Walk Score in previous posts. It's a simple, fun tool to measure your community's assets around the 21st Century Community principles of physical design. Now the folks at Walk Score have added some useful features. Visit http://www.walkscore.com/rankings/ to see their rankings of communities within each state and for different neighborhoods within select cities. You can also browse through "heat maps" which graphically represent Walk Scores across a region to help quickly identify walkable "hot spots" within a municipality or a region.

Luke Forrest is a Project Coordinator with the Center for 21st Century Communities. Call him at 734-669-6323 or email him.

 

This is the time of year that people eat, drink, and are merry, then join a yoga class, buy a treadmill and swear they will lose those twenty pounds!  I met with Dan Burden yesterday and he turned me on to a new kind of diet, a "road diet."  I just love that terminology and I told Dan that we've got some communities in Michigan that would benefit from the gastric bypass equivalent of a road diet!  Dan is the Director of Walkable Communities, a non-profit he founded in 1996 to promote walkabilty as a cornerstone for building vibrant communities.  He is passionate about shrinking our streets and putting our focus on people first, with walkability at the center of creating livable, connected communities.  He believes the types of streets that we built long ago, before automobiles ruled the world, are what we need to ensure future vitality in a community.  His mission aligns perfectly with the League's 21c3 initiative and we hope to bring Mr. Burden to many Michigan communities.  I'm not sure which will be more difficult, losing 20 pounds or shrinking our roads, but I think we could all benefit from the kind of diet Dan Burden prescribes!