When I posted the follow-up article on Walk Score, an alert reader pointed me to Drive Score. This site allows you to enter an address and get a score based on the number of businesses within drivable range. (Since I just proved that South Dakota is within "drivable range" of Florida, the How It Works page helped me understand what is being measured.Your Drive Score is a number between 0 and 100. T...

The Freakonomics blog has a provocative article asking What is the most racist city in America? The author of the article, Sudhir Venkatesh, asks for input on "quantifying racism" and suggests a "racism index" might allow someone to identify which city was the most racist. (He suggests it might be Boston, as his example.)The article is generating a number of comments, primarily anecdotal -- "I live...

Here's a head's-up from Tom Kingsley on the NNIP Listserve:Two reports have recently been released describing innovative local uses of parcel level data in community development. Most of the examples were done by partners in the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership (NNIP). The first is the final report on the five-city project NNIP did for the Brookings Urban Markets Initiative several year...

We've talked about Walk Score before and its use of walkability indicators for communities. Now they've come out with new rankings for America's Most Walkable Neighborhoods -- and they illustrate their article with a picture of my hometown. So I have to talk about it again, right?If you're interested, here's Jacksonville, Florida's Walk Score. And here's how the walk score calculations work. Look u...

You've seen the lists -- Top 25 Hottest Cities. Top 25 Cities for Singles. Top 25 Coolest Cities. Top 25 Cities to Live. Top 25 Friendliest Cities. Each of them develops some set of indicators as criteria, adds a trendy label, and then ranks a bunch of cities according to the desired index. It's gotten to the point where some magazines look like they have to have a Top 25 Cities list in every issue...