The Problem with WalkScore Rankings (Canada)

Подписаться 81 тыс.

Просмотров 13 тыс.

50% 1

Vancouver is by far the most walkable city in Canada, if you look at WalkScore rankings. If you look closer, you'll see that this isn't exactly an apples-to-apples comparison. WalkScore is still a really useful resource but we wanted to cover its limitations for city comparisons.
Support our videos on Patreon: / ohtheurbanity (we also really appreciate when viewers simply comment and share our videos/channel online or with others who might be interested).
Subscribe for more videos 👉 / @ohtheurbanity
#density #walkability #montreal #vancouver #walkscore #urbanism

Опубликовано:

21 ноя 2020

Ссылка:

Скачать:

Готовим ссылку...

Добавить в:

Мой плейлист

Посмотреть позже

Комментарии : 36

@seanshen8325 2 года назад

Vancouver might be controversial as ranked top 1 walkable in Canada, consider even in the Vancouver city limit there's a lot of Single Family House zones while in the city of Montreal, even out of downtown it is dominated by small apartments and townhouses.

@fearsomefawkes6724 3 года назад

Canadian content! Love it

@OhTheUrbanity 3 года назад

More to come!

@dartwaderua 2 года назад

80% walkability in North America and same number for a European city will give absolutely different experience. This rating is sometimes odd, unfortunately.

@moisesrosario9716 2 года назад

I saw parts of Central Ámsterdam get no more that 95% walkscore while some parts of Canadá and the USA that got over 95%. Also somewhere on the limits of Veracruz - Boca del Río (México) got a score over 90% on a 50% car centric - 50% bike friendly zone.

@robotgrass 3 года назад

Walk score for a given address in central Montreal gives a 92, yet the property directly across the street rates 75. How is this possible?

@OhTheUrbanity 3 года назад

Good question. Maybe that can happen if one side of the street is a bit closer to a location that has a bunch of amenities in one place (like a mall or commercial street). The path calculation might come into play too. If the street is small and easy to cross wherever you want, WalkScore might not recognize that, and instead assume that someone on one side has to walk further and use an intersection. That large of a difference is weird though. I've only come across smaller differences, like 3 or 9 points, not 17 points.

@trissevier6729 2 года назад

When I was looking for apartments a few months ago in Montreal, I noticed a lot of very walkable areas where most addresses scored over 90 would have some spots with a rating of 75, and always 75. I suspect there's some kind of glitch because I came across this so many times during my search.

@idromano 2 года назад

Thank you for bringing light to this detail! I'll pay more attention to this when I see those rankings. I believe a similar kind of _statistics manipulation_ happens here in Rio. It's said that we have hundreds of km of cycle paths, but most of those were bad from day one and have been buried over the years.

@mremumerm 2 года назад

Other issue for walkscore even at the neighbourhood level going from Ottawa to Halifax is that it is not take into considerations hills, as it does for cycling (and even then they seem to only look to quite close from what i see in Halifax)- this is an impact for many people. A 98 in Downtown Halifax is less walkable than a 90 in Ottawa for many people

@Lafv 2 года назад

I was wondering why Halifax didn't appear on any of the ranking lists even though our scores are pretty high (like, the highest outside of Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver). They set the boundaries so small that we're not even eligible for the list. I guess our scores would be a fair bit lower if the suburbs were included, but now I'm left wondering how we really compare to other cities. Love it when the rest of Canada forgets we exist :)

@RMTransit 3 года назад

Great video!

@OhTheUrbanity 3 года назад

Thanks! We watch all your videos 👍

@realityblooms 9 месяцев назад

I love how detailed you get

@AlbertaGengar 2 года назад

Great video

@OhTheUrbanity 2 года назад

Thank you!

@Toxinomist 3 года назад

Did the include the under ground city?

@RemiliaVampire Год назад

Jasper, Alberta is my favorite walkable place to live. it's about two streets of houses followed by two streets of strip plaza & that's the whole thing

@draftingish4833 2 года назад

Technically the surrounding cities are big enough to qualify for the list on thier own but I agree it drastically falls off when you leave Burnaby

@dr.winner2516 2 года назад

This must be the video that led to the creation of the "How to Meaningfully Compare Cities (Canada)" video

@OhTheUrbanity 2 года назад

Exactly right!

@tch1005 2 года назад

The thing with Halifax is, Halifax doesn't exist as a city. What people call 'Halifax' is actually the Halifax Regional Municipality (HRM), which is technically a county, and is the size of PEI.

@sehr.geheim 2 года назад

I love how the video just End

@andrewjensen8189 2 года назад

Ok sure it might not represent accurate values for each person's own perception of where the arbitrary boundaries between municipalities are, but for the specific parameters the researchers used it shows perfectly accurate results. I notice the difference in city planning priorities when I go to Richmond, Burnaby or other neighboring municipalities, which is why honing in the geographic boundaries to Vancouver proper, Toronto proper etc. where the planning and development is uniform is a better scale of comparison.

@OhTheUrbanity 2 года назад

Agreed that it can make sense to look at a smaller scale than the whole Greater Toronto or Greater Vancouver area. The issue is that the City of Vancouver is 26% of the GVA population, while the City of Toronto is 46% of the GTA. To make the City of Toronto really comparable, you'd probably want to exclude Etobicoke or Scarborough (or both).

@bicycles-as-far-as-im-aliv5725 2 года назад

Good one. Love it! Walk score are very inaccurate

@wclark3196 3 года назад

Yes, it's really not fair to include all of "Toronto." So much outside the older, pre-amalgamation boundaries of Toronto was developed post-war and is very car intensive. There are some parts of Etobicoke and Scarborough near the lake, old streetcar suburbs, that are fairly walkable, but most of Scarborough and Etobicoke and all of North York is a car-loving wasteland. York and East York have some very walkable and human-scale areas, though they have some car-intensive zones too. But then Vancouver is always full of crap. :)

@decadence8473 3 года назад

But both Etobicoke and Scarborough are still legit and inherent parts of Toronto, why would not they be included? I.e. Mississauga is a distinct city, but Etobicoke and Scarborough are not. I'd say that Toronto in general is not very walkable, only the downtown area is. And yet it has a walking score very close to Montreal, which is super walkable with lots of parts of the city easily accessible by bikes too, even having special bike lanes everywhere. Only the west island part of Montreal is similar to Toronto, but all the main city parts are much more walkable, which does not match the resulting score.

@adorabell4253 2 года назад

@@decadence8473 They are not inherent parts of Toronto. They were separate cities until about 20 years ago. They are not historical neighborhoods of the city and had their own development histories.

@Nunavuter1 2 года назад

@@decadence8473 Etobicoke and Scarborough were to Toronto what Laval is to Montreal. They were separate suburban cities until the province forced an amalgamation with the real Toronto. I'll never consider them proper parts of Toronto, and I'm not alone in this view.

@drivers99 2 года назад

What happened to my comment?

@OhTheUrbanity 2 года назад

We see normal comments deleted every so often and we're never sure if it's the person deleting them or RU-vid's algorithm gone wrong. I guess this is evidence of the latter, because we didn't delete it!

@drivers99 2 года назад

@@OhTheUrbanity ah, thanks for letting me know. Weird!