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Improve your car-free commute or daily dog-walking experience with mobile apps that help you find the best streets for strolling.

The free Web- and Android-friendly Walkonomics app ostensibly scores streets in eight categories — including how pretty, how steep, how dangerous, and even whether a sidewalk exists — based on open data from governments and ratings by app users.

Essentially, though, Walkonomics’s mobile, crowd-sourced cartography recognizes walking as a means and an end.

The streets between our Point As and Bs make up small stories written as we go, where wearing high heels or holding hands with a toddler, not just distance, can inform the journey. Tourists might look for the easily navigable streets; for joggers, streets with crosswalks; for everyone, streets with restaurants, parks, or stores.

Studying and facilitating walking is Walkonomics founder Adam Davies’s vocation. He blogs about walking’s effect on the environment, society and individuals, and vice versa. He tweets walking stats and stories almost daily.

To Davies, simply walking could solve so much. Purchasing has its power, but getting out the door is among the greenest things we can do.

“Things like rising fuel prices and the growing obesity crisis and Generation Y, my own age group, who long to live in urban areas and not have to own a car because it’s better for the environment … All of these different things feed into getting more people walking,” Davies said. “There’s no downside to making cities and streets more walkable.”

Swelling interest from the streets up could make walkability a high priority for local governments and businesses.

“Places like Los Angeles and Houston, some of those big, sprawling cities — as normal people abandon cars or hire cars like Zipcar, cities like that are going to have to change to attract people to live,” Davies said.

So far, Walkonomics covers every street in San Francisco, New York City, and all of England. Davies used “open data sets” — with info on streets’ cleanliness, for instance — released by governments in the past three years as well as app-users’ ratings. The latter could grow Walkonomics’s coverage exponentially.

“You can add a totally new street onto the system and start rating it yourself,” Davies said. “We’re still building the community. Once the crowd sourcing is working, it will be self-policing.”

Think eBay seller ratings, where mass feedback shapes appeal. With one out of five stars — do want to go down that road?

Davies expects Walkonomics for the iPhone to be available for download in a couple weeks. –Mackenzie Mount

This article appears courtesy of Sierra Magazine

Mackenzie Mount is an editorial intern at Sierra. She’s cleaned toilets at Yellowstone National Park and studied sustainable cooking at The Natural Epicurean Academy of Culinary Arts in Austin, Texas.

Top image: jessleecuizon

The post Take a Better Walk with Street-Rating Mobile Apps appeared first on EcoSalon.

Put your best foot forward.

A vigorous five-mile walk will do more good for an unhappy but otherwise healthy adult than all the medicine and psychology in the world. -Paul Dudley White

The best remedy for a short temper is a long walk. -Jacqueline Schiff

There is this to be said for walking: it’s the one mode of human locomotion by which a man proceeds on his own two feet, upright, erect, as a man should be, not squatting on his rear haunches like a frog. -Edward Abbey

My grandmother started walking five miles a day when she was sixty. She’s ninety-seven now, and we don’t know where the heck she is. -Ellen DeGeneres

There is nothing like walking to get the feel of a country. A fine landscape is likea piece of music; it must be taken at the right tempo. Even a bicycle goes too fast. -Paul Scott Mowrer

Everywhere is walking distance if you have the time. -Steven Wright

If you are seeking creative ideas, go out walking. Angels whisper to a man when he goes for a walk. -Raymond Inmon

When I’m in turmoil, when I can’t think, when I’m exhausted and afraid and feeling very, very alone, I go for walks. It’s just one of those things I do. I walk and I walk and sooner or later something comes to me, something to make me feel less like jumping off a building. -Jim Butcher

Solvitur ambulando, St. Jerome was fond of saying. To solve a problem, walk around. -Gregory McNamee

All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking. -Friedrich Nietzsche

I would walk along the quais when I had finished work or when I was trying to think something out. It was easier to think if I was walking and doing something or seeing people doing something that they understood. -Ernest Hemingway

I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in. -John Muir

Walking is the great adventure, the first meditation, a practice of heartiness and soul primary to humankind. Walking is the exact balance between spirit and humility. -Gary Snyder

Her pleasure in the walk must arise from the exercise and the day, from the view of the last smiles of the year upon the tawny leaves and withered hedges, and from repeating to herself some few of the thousand poetical descriptions extant of autumn – that season of peculiar and inexhaustible influence on the mind of taste and tenderness – that season which has drawn from every poet worthy of being read some attempt at description, or some lines of feeling. -Jane Austen, Persuasion

I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me. -Noël Coward

Me thinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow. -Henry David Thoreau

The true charm of pedestrianism does not lie in the walking, or in the scenery, but in the talking. The walking is good to time the movement of the tongue by, and to keep the blood and the brain stirred up and active; the scenery and the woodsy smells are good to bear in upon a man an unconscious and unobtrusive charm and solace to eye and soul and sense; but the supreme pleasure comes from the talk. -Mark Twain

Walking: the most ancient exercise and still the best modern exercise. -Carrie Latet

But the beauty is in the walking – we are betrayed by destinations. -Gwyn Thomas

Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it. -Soren Kierkegaard

I haven’t got any special religion this morning. My God is the God of Walkers. If you walk hard enough, you probably don’t need any other god. -Bruce Chatwin 

My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing. -Aldous Huxley

I dream of hiking into my old age. -Marlyn Doan

When you have worn out your shoes, the strength of the shoe leather has passed into the fiber of your body. I measure your health by the number of shoes and hats and clothes you have worn out. -Ralph Waldo Emerson

You need special shoes for hiking – and a bit of a special soul as well. -Terri Guillemets

I have two doctors, my left leg and my right. -G.M. Trevelyan

Many people nowadays live in a series of interiors… disconnected from each other. On foot everything stays connected, for while walking one occupies the spaces between those interiors in the same way one occupies those interiors. One lives in the whole world rather than in interiors built up against it. -Rebecca Solnit

An early-morning walk is a blessing for the whole day. -Henry David Thoreau

If I could not walk far and fast, I think I should just explode and perish. -Charles Dickens

Meandering leads to perfection. -Lao Tzu

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Images: Stephen Heron, Vinoth Chandar, Iryna Yeroshko

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