Where Are the Walkable Neighborhoods in Charlottesville/Albemarle?

People want to be able to walk to stuff.

My question for my readers is this – is your neighborhood walkable?

Walkscore is a great resource, although it’s data is not always 100% accurate. A new tool, optimalhomelocation.com (h/t Lifehacker) offers the potential to find the “best” location for you to live …

Here’s my very rudimentary definition, based on personal biases and listening to my clients’ wants and needs -

- Schools–(you can search by elementary school on my Charlottesville Home Search)

- Walkable neighborhood with sidewalks
–(Walkscore can help, but you’re better off asking someone or driving by the area – or better yet, we can ride to the properties on bicycles!)

- In range of a coffee shop/Main Street/grocery store/playground/park
– Google can help, but there’s no good mashup of MLS data with this information. The best suggestion I’ve seen is for a Google My Maps for each buyer/client.

- Broadband– High speed internet access is an absolute must for most of my clients; unfortunately the local Board has been reluctant to make that a searchable option in the MLS. Even better would be if the providers – Comcast and Embarq (DSL) would provide an API that could be mashed-up/embedded in blogs and websites.

- Curbside recycling
–The City of Charlottesville offers this service as part of the City trash program. — The County of Albemarle does not offer curbside recycling, but two private companies have recently sprung up to fill this need – My Recycling Club and Green Pieces Recycling, so if you’re in the Urban Ring of the County, you should be able to get recycling.

Now … If there was some way to combine Walkscore with Google Transit with Demographic data with a mashup of the Charlottesville MLS or other tool …

I have been saying for a long time that the Charlottesville area is becoming more segmented as the sub-areas become more self-sufficient. This is a very rough map that I did some time ago (holy cow! I just saw that it has more than 15k views in Google!) – but breaking this down into “walk- or bike – ability” is something that can not yet be done by software.

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