We're excited to launch a new way to help you understand your Walk Score. The Score Details Report explains the Walk Score of a location and shows which categories are more or less walkable. For example, a home or apartment might have great walkability for restaurants and shopping but not for parks and schools.

More Accurate Scores

Last year, with our 2014 City and Neighborhood Rankings, we launched our "Street Smart" Walk Score methodology. We've started rolling this more accurate methodology out to every address. To do this, we've analyzed over 300 billion walking routes to update the Walk Score for 1.5 billion locations.

Updated scores and the Score Details Report are available today on all of our apartment and rental listings and will be coming to your address soon. If you'd like your Score Details Report and updated score, just Tweet @walkscore with your address and we'll send you a link.

How Does "Street Smart" Walk Score Work?

For each location, "Street Smart" Walk Score computes the walkability of an address by calculating hundreds of walking routes to nearby places, measuring the depth of choice in each category (e.g. restaurant choice), analyzing pedestrian friendliness, and using the best local data including tens of thousands of places added by the Walk Score community.

For walkable neighborhoods (pictured above on the left), our "Street Smart" methodology does a better job distinguishing between walkable and very walkable places. Getting a high score requires depth of choice — for example, the ability to walk to a large number of restaurants. In walkable neighborhoods, scores will be similar or may increase.

For less walkable neighborhoods (pictured above on the right), scores may decrease because walking routes are longer and pedestrian friendliness is lower (measured by urban planning metrics such as average block length and intersection density).

Thanks to all the people in all the bright places on the map above who have looked up their Walk Score! As always, please send us your feedback!

To view the original article, visit the WalkScore blog.