Thursday, April 2, 2015

What's Within Walking Distance of Your Home or Business?

I've got a friend who lives in an apartment on the lower south hill. When I hang out with her on weekends, we plan our time around where we can walk to, in order to avoid trying to find parking downtown or worrying if we stop to have a cocktail. We used to try to guess how far certain of our favorite entertainment venues were. Most of the time we guessed correctly and could easily walk downtown, have some fun, and walk home again. I remember one night where we overestimated and thought we could walk to Elkfest in Browne's Addition. The walk there was fine but I recall an extremely long walk home later that night.

Well, my point is that you know longer have to guess what's within your walking area. The app LetsWalkTo lets you search for bars, restaurants, entertainment and some other key venues, by walking time. The picture above is a screenshot of what I saw when I pulled up the site to look for downtown Spokane locations. You can click on it to see if full size.

You could also use it when visiting cities you're not familiar with. For instance, when on vacation a while back, a hotel staff member directed myself and a friend to a "nearby" grocery store that was supposedly only "a mile away, at most." After 40 minutes of walking, we finally hailed a cab and the driver told us the store was at least three miles from our hotel. Live and learn, I guess.

Check out LetsWalkTo here.

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About SRTC

SRTC is the federally designated Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) for Spokane County. Urbanized areas with populations exceeding 50,000 people are required to have an MPO. SRTC was formed to address the county's transportation planning needs. It provides coordination in planning between the public, cities, small towns, the county, the state, transit providers, and tribes.

SRTC offers services including transportation monitoring, transportation modeling, census information analysis, travel demand forecasting, historical traffic count analysis, geographic information systems, and trip generation rates.