Driving alone is simply a bad habit that many people don’t think often about changing.
But when it comes to initially choosing where they want to live or work, it appears they truly give transportation a little more thoughtful consideration.
For example, according to research Mobility Lab will soon release, nearly two-thirds of residents in Arlington, Va., who recently made a home or work location change considered how close their new location would be to transportation services, primarily access to Metrorail.
That’s why TransitScreen’s latest offering – MobilityScore – is going to be so handy to potentially millions of people throughout the U.S. and Canada, where it is currently rolling out.
The handsome interface allows users to drop a pin or type in an address and – whoosh! – a radius zone appears on the map with options like bus and subway stops, bikesharing, Ubers and Lyfts, and carshares like car2go and Zipcar.
Perhaps best of all is the green-and-blue “mobility score” assigned to each location, on a scale of zero (for terrible options) to 100.
The only catch, I thought, is that this kind of system must already exist. Walk Score is a very popular ranking that real-estate developers, especially, have been using for years to assess the value of their properties.
“The main difference between this and Walk Score is that we take into account all forms of mobility,” said Rachel Karitis, TransitScreen’s communications and support manager.
“We view this and Walk Score as complimentary, since that information is still useful — just more so to measure how easy it is to walk to nearby amenities, parks, rather than how easy it is to get around without a car.”
Typing in Mobility Lab’s address (see above screenshot) shows that we are in a location with a score of 85 – falling into the category of “Excellent Mobility.” However, my transit-spoiled soul was feeling a little short-changed. Mobility Lab has all the amenities that MobilityScore takes into account, and most important, we’re less than three blocks from the Rossyln Metrorail station in Arlington.
If all Mobility Lab gets is an 85, is it even possible to score 100?
“The radius for MobilityScore is fairly small, and some modes of transportation get a higher weight than others. We also take into account how often the transit is actually coming, how long it will take you to walk to it and then wait for it, and more.” Karitis said.
She added that the Farragut North Metro Station in Washington D.C., and Philadelphia City Hall are a couple of examples of places with perfect mobility scores.
“It varies from block to block as your walk time to the station is lowered, so if you move around the area closer to the Rosslyn station, it should increase,” she said.
The inner circle in MobilityScore’s design is for bikeshare and the outer circle is for other forms of transit, based on what is known about how willing people are to walk varying distances to different kinds of transportation, as opposed to just hopping in their own vehicles.
TransitScreen has already added data for the top 30 U.S. metropolitan areas (and five in Canada) and plans to eventually have both countries fully covered.
“Our long-term goal is to create a common way to be able to measure transportation access, having a common language between real-estate professionals, urban planners, and people searching for apartments,” Karitis said. “We’re also exploring ways to use all this data for analysis and recommendations, like how much will adding a bikeshare station increase your score versus adding a carshare parking space?”
It should be noted that TransitScreen has blown up into five countries, 10 languages, and 33 cities. The company started at Mobility Lab as part of a fellowship program we operated for tech enthusiasts to test how to get more people thinking more deeply about their transportation options.
Photos by TransitScreen.