Is Walk Score a useful tool for measuring walkability in rural communities?

How often Americans exercise, especially through walking, is strongly connected to the built environments in which they live.1 Numerous studies over two decades report residents walking more when their communities are judged more walkable, either by objective measures or through residents’ own perceptions.2, 3 However, the majority of these studies have focused on urban areas.2, 3 Researchers who wish to investigate the connection between walking and walkability in rural settings can use validated surveys to record subjective perceptions, but a popular objective measure, the Walk Score, appears not to be useful at all. The importance of researching physical activity in rural environments is clear. Rural residents are disproportionately affected by chronic diseases and conditions including obesity, which are strongly associated with inactivity.4 Rural residents are less physically active than urban dwellers and walk less often.5 Despite the assumption that rural communities have easy access to open spaces and trails, research shows this not to be true.6 Walk Score is a commonly used measure of objectively assessing walkability in communities. It is a public, free, web-based tool that is available through most of the world.7 A search in PubMed with the search terms “walkscore” and “walk score” revealed 191 papers that had used the tool, with 160 of these occurring since 2015. While many of these studies are conducted in high-density urban areas, others are done nationally.8 Walk Score measures walkability using a patented system that is not entirely transparent.7 A street address receives a score based on walking routes to nearby amenities, which include grocery stores, shopping destinations, restaurants, schools, parks, movie theaters, pharmacies, libraries, and so on. Shorter routes receive more points than longer ones: a 5-minute walk gets maximum points and a 30-minute walk or greater gets no points. Population density, block length, and intersection density also count toward the score. The drawback of using this methodology in rural settings is that it fails to account for walking without a destination to an amenity. A rural address located more than a 30-minute walk from amenities, for example, may receive a Walk Score of zero, despite being located on a road with low traffic volume and wide sidewalks—characteristics that contribute to ideal walking conditions. This disparity of amenities shows up in a study that found rural residents reported low numbers of destinations within walking distance, such as shopping (19.2%), transit stops (4.6%), or movies, libraries, and churches (17.7%). Relaxing destinations (e.g., parks, water, other green spaces), however, were reported more often.9 One study in rural communities in the southeastern United States found walking trips were frequently to neighbors’ homes and bodies of water rather than typical destinations.10 In Spain, a study found intersections and population density predicted walking to school in urban environments, but it was regulated crossings, positive streetscapes, and crossing quality that predicted the same in rural communities.11 In our current study, we examined perceived walkability and walking behavior with 313 individuals across 18 rural communities in Oregon.12 We found no relationship between Walk Score and self-reported walking in the community. However, we did find significant positive relationships between perceived walkability, social norms for walking, and walking in the community.13 True walkability, or how easy or hard it is to walk in a community, is a multifactorial assessment measured both objectively and subjectively with only moderate concordance between the two.14 Objective measures of walkability have typically been developed in urban areas and focus on utilitarian aspects of walking (ie, intersection density, land use mix, dwelling density, and net retail area). Objective measures typically focus on either active transportation or recreation and have different salient factors.15 For example, a study of children's walking behavior found that walkability indexes were negatively correlated with walking for exercise in rural communities.16 In urban environments with numerous destinations, active transportation has been the main focus of research, but in rural communities, which often lack gyms and other exercise facilities, recreational walking is the more common mode. One national U.S. study showed similar rates of leisure time walking between urban (52.9%) and rural (48.3%) residents but large differences in walking for transportation (34.5% vs 21.1%).9 Traditional measures of walkability may be appropriate for compact downtown areas like town centers in microcommunities, but less appropriate for people living outside of metro and micro areas.17 Also, as big data becomes more readily available, large nationwide epidemiological studies are becoming more prevalent without accounting for the nuances of rural communities. For instance, a Dutch study examined walkability by measuring population density, retail and service density, land use mix, street connectivity, green space, sidewalk density, and public transport density across the entire country18—all factors found far less in rural settings. Measuring rural walkability requires tools specifically designed for rural communities, and no reliable tool currently exists that functions simply by entering a physical address.19 The Rural Active Living Assessment provides a town-wide assessment of walkability, but is resource-intensive and is not currently available at scale throughout the country. Another tool, the Inventories for Community Health Assessment in Rural Towns, will be available to researchers as a smartphone-based application in 2025, but also relies on users to walk through a neighborhood to assess built environments.20 Further, a recent review of walkability instruments in general found that none provided an assessment of weather and other mitigating factors including thermal comfort, precipitation, and seasonal fluctuations.21 Work remains to be done in developing tools that reliably measure walkability in rural communities, on a large scale and that produce immediate results by entering physical addresses. Developing these tools should focus on including assessments of sidewalks, safe street crossings, presence of town centers, trails, parks and other greenspaces, rural-specific destinations including relaxing places, and other safety issues. In the meantime, we strongly recommend not using Walk Score in rural settings. The authors have nothing to report. The study is supported by the National Institute of Nursing Research. Rebecca Seguin-Fowler is the owner of StrongWomen/StrongPeople LLC and is also the Principal Investigator of the iCHART research and tool.