IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/sae/envirb/v53y2026i3p494-506.html

The Walkable Accessibility Score (WAS): A spatially granular open-source measure of walkability for the continental US from 1997 to 2019

Author

Listed:
  • Kevin Credit
  • Irene Farah
  • Emily Talen
  • Luc Anselin
  • Hassan Ghomrawi

Abstract

This paper describes a straightforward method for calculating an open-source Walkable Accessibility Score (WAS) that measures walkability at the block group scale based on walking distance to business establishments, schools, and parks. Exploratory analysis of the WAS reveals high concentrations of walkable accessibility in the centres of the densest and/or largest cities. Our optimised specification ( decay = 0.008, upper = 800, k = 30) performs very well, achieving a Spearman rank correlation of 0.912 with proprietary Walk Score® values (for 2011). We provided pre-calculated data for each year from 1997 to 2019 and Python code for calculating the WAS at the project’s GitHub repository . The method is particularly useful in that it uses simple Euclidean distance calculations, and thus can be run at scale on a laptop or personal computer.

Suggested Citation

  • Kevin Credit & Irene Farah & Emily Talen & Luc Anselin & Hassan Ghomrawi, 2026. "The Walkable Accessibility Score (WAS): A spatially granular open-source measure of walkability for the continental US from 1997 to 2019," Environment and Planning B, , vol. 53(3), pages 494-506, March.
    • Handle: RePEc:sae:envirb:v:53:y:2026:i:3:p:494-506
    DOI: 10.1177/23998083251377116
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/23998083251377116
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1177/23998083251377116?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:sae:envirb:v:53:y:2026:i:3:p:494-506. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: SAGE Publications (email available below). General contact details of provider: .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.