When looking at this recent survey of what people want in a neighborhood, I thought it was interesting how important walkability and public transportation are to people buying a home. Since Southern California is so car dependent, these are issues for many of our communities.
Even with our excellent weather and wonderful communities, Walk Score does not rank San Diego County highly on their walkability scale. We have no cities scoring 50 or above on their scale of 0 to 100. The city of San Diego scores the highest in the county at a still car-dependent score of 49.
San Diego County is young compared to many other parts of the United States. Our population grew significantly during the time we planned cities around automobiles. We also have a lot of suburban communities. If our cities had grown more, or in some cases even existed, prior to the use of cars or if they were more densely populated, we might score higher. Even two North County cities that have put money and resources into developing trail systems, Carlsbad and San Marcos, still only score at 27 and 30 respectively. This is because Walk Score is looking at how easily people can walk to amenities like grocery stores, schools, parks, retail and restaurants. The trail systems allow for wonderful walks, but don’t necessarily get us to those amenities.
I realize that some of the things that make living in San Diego County wonderful, like the open space and lack of population density, make walkability that much more difficult, but still hope we can work on making our communities more walkable.
