Also, as noted, safety is not a concern with WalkScore – I’d have to trudge down a highway – yes, there’s a sidewalk – I’d have to cross 4 lanes of 50mph traffic to get to it! And, as another poster noted, I have little use for the categories WalkSmart values – theaters, bars, coffee shops, etc. (The “fitness” place they offer is a kids’ gym, btw.)

Even so, I can’t walk to any of them, can only walk about 100 feet due to a back problem. Do 80% of my shopping (including groceries) online. Hubby does the rest. I keep a wheelchair in my trunk for when I “absolutely, positively” HAVE to “walk”. (Grocery delivery is $6.95 for orders over $100; I s-t-r-e-t-c-h that delivery fee by only shopping every 3 weeks – and to think 2 yrs ago I could hardly imagine shopping only once a week!)

Hubby’s vehicle is pretty much a “service vehicle”, packed sky-high with tools and supplies and what-not, so MY car is pretty much our only “actual” family car. Both are paid-for, older (1998 and 2002).

We’ve had periods – years-long on each occasion – when we were a one-car household. However, those times were so long ago that I cannot recall how inconvenient it was. I just recall that I did not like it.

Please read the book Effective Cycling by John Forester if you are a bicyclist at all.

I am a longtime bike commuter, and i agree with part of what Sharon says, though not the whole thing. Bicycling, done properly is probably just about as safe as driving a car. The problem is, there are **very** few people who understand how to do it properly. The people Sharon was writing about were definitely among the unknowing yet ignorant group.

Please, if you ride a bike, read the book Effective Cycling by John Forester. It will change your bicycling for the better. You will stop having those troublesome “incidents” and conflicts that you have on the road and find yourself suddenly being able to safely, and effectively, and enjoyable ride to your destination.

Safe cycling goes way beyond signaling turns. there’s also understanding the sub-lanes within a traffic lane, positioning yourself properly in the lane to be seen, keeping a steady line at all times, learning to look behind you to see if the way is clear every time you move laterally on the roadway, and learning how to handle intersections, rotaries, and left hand turns.

Those are the big ones. Most cyclists make mistakes on at least one of them, mistakes that are dangerous but which, hopefully, they might not be called to count on. If you don’t immediately know what I’m talking about here, that’s your first indicator to read the book.

I am including among the “ignorant” all the bicyclists who’ve been riding seriously for 20 years or more but haven’t read the book, as well as those who were taught by their parents or by other cyclists–unless those were statistically unusual parents or cyclists. I was a serious utility bicyclist for 10 years before I read the book, and it totally changed my understanding of how to operate on the road, vastly for the better.

So, again, if you haven’t heard of Effective Cycling, the book, that probably is an indicator that could stand to learn a great deal from it. Please read it and cycle in good health and fun!

Nowadays I have three vehicles (A) a main car that gets about 12,000 miles a year (B) a the wife’s ride that gets used about 2,000 miles a year (C) a rough service Jeep for those dirty jobs and really bad snow days, that gets used about 1,000 miles a year. I have no car payments so the costs are for insurance, licensing, maintenance and fuel.

Walk Score shows the nearest of several categories but the choices are not necessarily useful. For example, the library it showed specializes in deep scholarly philosophy books mostly written in Danish. The food store is the most expensive in town. The clothing store is only for young women and is expensive (and if I hung around there I would get arrested for ogling the customers). But it is true that all of these places are in walking distance.

Despite all the cars I regularly walk to (or past) three pharmacies, three libraries (in English), two coffee shops, several restaurants, two food stores, two auto parts stores, several bars, several barber shops, several banks (but not mine! I do it by mail and on-line.), a hardware store, various schools. Unfortunately the big-box stores like KMart and Target are a bit far, as is the big format hardware and lumberyard. I guess I really could give up some of the machinery.

I’m talking about riding a bicycle or motorcycle versus a vehicle. You might try rereading my post.

Why don’t you do that? I suppose you’d have us all driving Hummers, if not something even heavier? But you might want to think about the political, environmental, & economic consequences of that, and how they might impact safety. You also might want to actually look at evidence, instead of blindly assuming that the heavier vehicle is safer. What are the actual death/injury rates per mile of bikes vs cars, or small cars vs SUVs? The answers might surprise you.

As a case in point, consider my neighbors’ kid. Her dad bought her a cute little yellow sports car for her high school graduation. Other family thought she was not safe zipping around in that little thing, and finally her boyfriend wore her down, and got her to buy a big, safe pickup. So they’re driving along one night a few weeks ago, and went off the road for some reason. In the little car, this would have been embarrasing at worst, but that big safe pickup rolled over and killed them both.

You need to realize that the auto makers have been lying to you all along, about a lot of things. Big SUVs & pickups are not safer, they just let US automakers sell their poorly-engineered junk to the gullible. Nor is there any reason in the world why we can’t have cars getting 50 or even 100 mpg: it’s just that the automakers won’t build them for fear of disturbing their SUV revenue stream.

People, the person you are DIES when you have a severe head injury, and you may or may not want to be the person who is left. Many very nice people turn into violent, unemployable folks who cannot function well in society ever again, if they survive at all.

How likely is it that you will be involved in a bike-auto collision? More likely than you probably want to think. But even if it is actually extremely unlikely, you need to consider the SEVERITY of the consequences.

Let’s see. You, say, 150 pounds, vs the car, say 3,000 pounds. Who do you think is going to win the encounter? Even if you have a bike helmet, it isn’t magic. There will be significant damage to your body, probably your face and brain, and if you have no health insurance, or lousy health insurance, and no disability insurance, now what do you plan to do? You or your survivors are looking at medical expenses potentially in the millions of dollars. It could be years before you can get another job, too.

The young couple had no idea that the consequences of their casual, fun outing to the ice cream store could be so severe, and they promised to get bike helmets. That is all I asked that they do, but I longed to tell them to take bike safety courses and leave their beautiful baby girl somewhere where she would be safe in a collision, or at least safer.

Please, THINK your decisions through, looking at consequences of the not so optimal outcomes. Look at the entire picture, not just the rosy projections.

I have a 6 out of 100 and the only reason is a gas station/quickie mart on the corner.

About library — surely you can ask for inter-library loan instead of traveling to another library. I like that you make it a family outing. Why don’t you check when they have special reading/storytelling hours for the kids and go then?

But I’m in the garden, on a hiking trail, cross country skiing, or doing something similar, at least for an hour or so, maybe 8 days out of 10 (and I count the other two days as wasted). Those things are what’s important to me & my quality of life. Living in the sort of dense urban neighborhoods they imagine would seem to mean giving up most of them.

I own a bike, but it’s worth more to me than my car, and I would be heartbroken if it got stolen (very big possibility here). So, I can ride it to work (we have a bike cage) but I don’t otherwise feel comfortable with leaving it locked up somewhere. It lives in my apartment and I have to carry it up MANY stairs, so adding a beater bike to the mix isn’t an option at present.

Finally, if I had kids, I don’t know if I’d stay in my location (schools and parks might be a bigger deal at that point). It works great for a single person though!

Grocery shopping. We do it on foot, several times a week (too much to carry if we do it only once). Every so often we have our groceries delivered (the store charges $3 or so) and then we take advantage of the opportunity to buy a heck of a lot of stuff, especially heavy or large stuff.

Some people I know who choose to not have a car have found that for the occasional purposes they need a car (for example, leaving the city for hiking or family visiting) it is more cost effective to rent a car for the weekend, or join a car-sharing service. Some of them use the occasional taxi and still find it very cost-effective (overall, not per use, of course).

Another family I know has chosen to have a scooter as their second vehicle.

Even so, a score of 3 is absolutely realistic for where I live (a mile outside of the urban growth boundary, but only 17 miles to downtown). More than the inaccuracies of walkscore, it values things I don’t care about (don’t need a movie theater since I have high speed Internet and DVDs, don’t want a coffee shop since I don’t like coffee, don’t want a bar because that’s the most expensive form of alcohol, etc.). Out in my neck of the woods, one learns to order things from the Internet rather than waste time in stores.

There are quicky marts and then there are quicky marts… I’ve known a few corner stores smaller than a 7-eleven that rival full-size supermarkets in quality and price (example: Eastmoreland Grocery in Portland, OR, though it recently sold to new owners).

And, finally, Trent, as others have said, you’re being too soft on going for a single car. If an emergency can’t wait for transportation, you dial 911.

My walkscore is about 5/100 :-) We actually have only 1 car; but if the kids are sick then I have to drive home from work to take them to the doctor. I can see why people stick with 2 cars in the USA.

I think this has got a lot to do with the design of US cities. They are simply not designed to be walkable (excluding inner-city areas and older cities like SF, NY, Boston, etc). Indianapolis, I can assure you, is unwalkable if you live in the burbs.