Walkability Index

A walkability index measures how well a neighbourhood's built environment supports walking, by combining a small set of land-use and street-design variables into a single score. The influential index developed by Lawrence Frank and colleagues sums standardized measures of residential density, land-use mix, street connectivity, and retail floor-area ratio, giving extra weight to intersection density because connected street grids most strongly enable walking. Consumer tools such as Walk Score popularized the same idea by scoring an address on the proximity and variety of nearby destinations, making walkability a routine input to planning, public health, and real-estate analysis.