Industry
Part of Pedestrian Friendly Stays Comparison: A Vetting Guide
How to choose a walkable block before booking a stay: the 5, 10 and 15 minute rings
How to choose a walkable block before a property: use five, ten and fifteen minute rings, check one street back, and read mapped tree cover and land use data.
Choosing a property before choosing a block is the wrong order, yet almost every booking site encourages it. A block is a set of options: what is open, what is close, what you will walk past every day.
Pick the block first. The property choice then becomes easy, because any block worth staying on usually has only three or four candidates.
What to take away
- Draw three rings around a candidate blockfive, ten and fifteen minutes on foot.
- Each ring has a job. If the five-minute ring is empty, the block fails.
- Tree cover, drainage and land use are all mapped, and they explain a lot about how a block feels.
- The block you want is usually one street back from the one in the photographs.
The three rings
Should contain
- Five minutes
- Coffee, a place to sit, a bin, a crossing
- Ten minutes
- Groceries, food after eight, transit
- Fifteen minutes
- The reason you came, plus a second one
If it does not
- Five minutes
- The block is a dormitory
- Ten minutes
- You will be taking taxis
- Fifteen minutes
- The base is in the wrong town
Walk the rings in satellite view before booking. Count doors rather than pins on the map, because a mapped business is not the same as an open one.
The three walk-shed rings
- Five minutescoffee, seat, bin, crossing
- Ten minutesgroceries, food after eight, transit
- Fifteen minutesthe reason, plus a second
- Walk the rings in satellite view first
- Count doors, not pins on the map
One street back
The best walking blocks are rarely the postcard ones. Main streets are loud on weekend nights, expensive, and often dead by nine when the shops close. One street back you get quiet, lower rates, and a two-minute walk to everything the main street has.
Main street vs one street back
Main street
- Noise
- Loud weekends
- Cost
- Expensive
- Evenings
- Dead by nine
- Barrier
- Signal crossing
- Grade
- Level
One street back
- Noise
- Quiet
- Cost
- Lower rates
- Evenings
- Two minutes away
- Barrier
- Check arterial
- Grade
- Check contours
Test for the barrier before you commit. If getting to the main street means crossing an arterial without a signal, one street back becomes ten minutes back.
The same logic applies to grade. One street back and thirty feet up is a different proposition from one street back on the level, particularly at the end of a long day. Check the contour lines, not just the map, before deciding a cheaper block is the same block.
What the mapped data adds
A surprising amount about a block is public: EPA's EnviroAtlas fact sheets describe more than 500 data layers available in the interactive map. Each listing gives a layer description, where it appears on the map, and metadata links.
Tree cover, land cover, and community-level indicators matter here: shade in summer and how much of the block is hard surface.
Drainage is the other thing to look for, and EPA's land use and green infrastructure scorecard helps municipalities review plans and policies at municipal, neighborhood and site scales. The scorecard aims to protect water resources while gaining benefits such as flood mitigation.
Blocks in towns that have done this work tend to have street trees, planted strips and fewer standing puddles at the corners. That is a real difference on a rainy walking weekend.
Then choose the property
Only once the block is decided does the property comparison make sense, and at that point the three-zone check sorts the candidates quickly. If everything on the block is booked, the first visit routine matters more, because you are arriving somewhere you have not been able to choose carefully.
