MRED Blog

Adding to Walk Scores recent release of 10,000 new city and neighborhood pages, they have announced two new pieces of local insight: Social Neighborhood Tags and Crime Reports.

Social Neighborhood Tags

For over 3,000 neighborhoods in almost 200 cities we’ve analyzed millions of tweets to let you know what people are talking about and what makes a place unique.

For example, people in Bellevue, Washington are talking about delicious Din Tai Fung dumplings:

Social Neighborhood Tags for Bellevue, WA

People in the North End of Boston are talking about the Bruins (and oysters)!

Social Neighborhood Tags for the North End, Boston

Crime Reports and Maps

Today we’re also launching Crime Reports in Seattle, San Francisco, and Chicago with more cities on the way soon.

Crime is complex.  Other real estate sites have crime maps that look like population maps.  They simply show you that more crimes are reported where there are more people. This can be misleading since it doesn’t tell you anything about your odds of being a victim of a crime — and this can makes cities, especially downtowns, look less safe than they really are.

Today we’re launching the first crime statistics that let you accurately compare crime at the neighborhood level.  Our crime data comes directly from police departments that release geotagged reports for every crime in a city.

In order to provide apples-to-apples comparisons between neighborhoods, we normalize our crime statistics by how many people live and work in the neighborhood and weight crimes according to severity.  This allows you to assess your individual crime risk.  For example, a downtown may have a lot of reported crime, but if it has a large number of residents and workers, your individual risk may still be low.

Post via Walk Score

Here is a great inforgraphic showing the top cities with Car Share from Walk Score

Car Share Infographic Footnotes

• $9,859 yearly car ownership data is from AAA.
• Hourly costs is based on car share data from Getaround.
• Top model data is based on peer-to-peer car shares only (Getaround and RelayRides).
• Ranking is based on most car share locations per city/neighborhood.
• Car share providers on Walk Score infographic: City CarShare, Enterprise CarShare, Getaround, Hertz On Demand, I-GO, RelayRides, WeCar, Zipcar, car2go
• See more car sharing trends.