Yesterday, the highly debatable Walk Score posted to its site so-called "heat maps" for most of the nation's biggest cities and their surrounding neighborhoods. You'll find Dallas here -- along with a ranking of 26 neighborhoods from highest (Main Street Districts, which scores a near-perfect 98) to lowest (South Dallas, coming in at a mere 26). Patrick "Car-Free" Kennedy reminds, he's never much cared for the Walk Score system of scoring: "It is a step in the right direction, but like all statistics, an abstraction." Of the Dallas rankings, he writes:
Main Street in downtown Dallas is considered the most walkable in all of DFW. Not a stretch, but that it is a 98 out of 100, might be. Is it really as walkable as Center City Philadelphia? Portland? Old town Alexandria, VA? Surely not, but I can accommodate my daily needs here. It is inflated because of the issues mentioned above and it counts tunnel businesses which are mostly only open 11am to 2pm, serving the office population which swells above 150,000 each day from a night time (permanent resident) population of about 5,500.Still, the map does make the same point as Daniel Iacofano of MIG, whose Downtown Dallas 360 plan debuts at the convention center December 6: "This idea of the city of districts is alive and well in Dallas," certainly near downtown.
