Public transit is sexy, but what I’m really interested in is walking. For a while now I’ve had the idea of applying some walkability metrics to Victoria. (I’ll admit: to test my intuitive thesis that it’s the right size for a city rather than to do blind research.) I’ve just come across two that do a better job than anything I could hack together with the Google Maps API:

The average person supposedly walks at 5 km/h, covering 400 or so metres in 5 minutes. Many pedestrian advocacy groups use this distance as a rule-of-thumb. It turns out that 400 metres is also the radius of damage caused by a 0.05 kiloton explosion (2 of the USAF’s MOAB bombs or 1.7% of the Halifax Explosion).* So to see an overlay of this distance as the crow flies, point a bomb simulator at your location. For example, 400 metres from Douglas & Yates approximates the edges of downtown I proposed earlier.

In The Age of Streetcars, cities were organized into “city fingers“: tendrils of development clustered along streetcar lines. You’d have to take mass transit for work and significant shopping, but you could afford enough space to raise a family and still conveniently walk to grocery stores, restaurants, coffee shops, etc. This tool attempts to calculate a “walk score” for a location by the distance to various amenities. Its major failing right now is that the metadata in Google Maps (and the phone book, which is where I suspect they get it from) is so bad: if I lived at Douglas & Yates I wouldn’t do my grocery shopping at Mac’s Convenience Store nor Eugene’s Greek Restaurant (although living near a restaurant that sells fresh tortillas would be nice). Also, being an American tool, it doesn’t include liquor stores.

One application of these measurements is to visualize the world post-Peak Oil. So the next question is: if you take out all the roads, how much can you fit in 0.5 km²?

* Unfortunately, bombs are not yet big enough to take out 100 Miles.