Do You Live in an Urban, Suburban, Exurban, or Rural Area?

[traininthedistance]

...it really isn't all that walkable, for some reason.

Red posted a "walkscore" map at some point.  Or maybe it was someone else.

Okay, here it is.  It was phknrocket who posted it:

https://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=103474.0

Typing in my zip code I get "55:  somewhat walkable."  I'm not really sure what goes into that algorithm, or whether it works for locations outside the United States, but it's an interesting website.  It is problematic, however.  It seems to take into account mostly how many stores, bars, schools, cinemas, and other commercial venues are near your location, and apply some algorithm, and come up with a score based on that.  This is misleading, however.  In the US, it is not uncommon for people to live 500 meters from a huge shopping mall, but to walk that path directly would be exceedingly dangerous and illegal, so that in reality one might have to travel many miles to arrive at the nearest retail outlet, even though your location might have a fairly high "walkability" score.  Also, it doesn't seem to take into account the pleasantness of the walk.  Is there a sidewalk to walk upon?  Does crossing a major street involve pushing a button and waiting for the crosswalk light, or do you just cross your fingers and run like hell hoping not to get hit by a car?  It seems only to be about distances.  It also seems to be funded by apartment renters and realtors, which probably raises flags with respect to its objectivity.

Maybe there's a better algorithm out there, which compares walking in various neighborhoods in a more practical way.

Yeah, that pretty much hits the nail on the head wrt Walkscore's limitations.  Of course, making a more robust algorithm is actually really hard, because if you're gonna scale it to large areas, it's going to have to be automated, and it's not so easy to automate the subjective pedestrian experience.  Even though it is easy to tell the difference between a) auto-centered development where you have to walk out of the way, with intermittent-to-no-sidewalks, with cars whizzing by, and b) traditional town centers.  How do you plug that in to the formula?  I'm not aware of a computer that's able to look at Street View imagery and make the determination.  (Yet. If there are any programmers out there that have cracked that nut, I will raise my glass.)

Well, there is one thing I can think of that would make a little bit of difference- if we could get super-detailed maps that actually know when there are sidewalks and pedestrian paths*, and if we calculate distance based on walking paths rather than just radii.  That's definitely calculable, and even if it can't tell the difference between high-quality sidewalks and worthless tokens on the side of speedways, it's a start.  Of course, that depends on having all that data in your map layer, and I don't think we're there yet, at least not in most places.  So we're stuck with the imperfect WalkScore as the best scalable tool so far.

*One thing that I see sometimes, but not nearly enough, when looking at twisty auto-maze development, is walking paths that provide shortcuts and don't just go along the roads.  I suspect that adding them back in is going to be one of the few bits of retrofit low-hanging fruit that those areas will be able to do to increase their quality of life.  But of course there is going to need to be a bit of a culture change where people realize that maybe they want to be able to walk to places, or at least recognize that the freedom to be able to walk to places is a legitimate freedom.

[traininthedistance]

Oh, and to answer the OP's question... urban of course.

My neighborhood actually has a bunch of turn-of-the-century Victorians which in another context could seem suburban, but it also has apartment buildings and a subway line and all that jazz.  

The neighborhood I grew up in was very much inner-suburban; my street was developed in the 1920s though some nearby areas are postwar.  There's a small commercial strip very nearby that makes walking for some things feasible (restaurants, dry-cleaning, barbershops, that sort of stuff) but it's limited what you can do.  The other side of town is older and more urban- if you plug my parents' home into WalkScore you get 49 for our address, but just the zip code gets you a 71 (and certain areas will go higher than that).

Oh and it appears that WalkScore does in fact calculate distances along paths rather than just a circular buffer, which is a decent baseline level of sophistication.

[traininthedistance]

Rural area.

Where in NJ is rural?

While all of NJ is in a statistical metro area, that's an artifact of county boundaries.  More of NJ than you'd think is rural, especially in the south.  Salem and Cumberland still have plenty of farms, and the sparsely-populated Pine Barrens take up much of Burlington and Ocean.  You could make an argument for parts of the northwest as well, though the exurban fringe has been eating into that for awhile.

[traininthedistance]

Rural area.

Where in NJ is rural?

While all of NJ is in a statistical metro area, that's an artifact of county boundaries.  More of NJ than you'd think is rural, especially in the south.  Salem and Cumberland still have plenty of farms, and the sparsely-populated Pine Barrens take up much of Burlington and Ocean.  You could make an argument for parts of the northwest as well, though the exurban fringe has been eating into that for awhile.

I suppose so. Though my post was more a divining effort to see if NJ Christian is one of those suburbanites who claims to be rural.

The municipality I live in is included on this list:

http://www.rurdev.usda.gov/NJEligibleAreas.html

Plus, city-data.com says it is overwhelmingly rural.

I'm not entirely sure how Burlington City got on that USDA list, among others.  A lot of those towns are functionally exurban or even just suburban.

City-data's rural/urban classifications seem to be pretty appropriately strict, though.  If they say you're rural... you're rural.  (I assume they're using the Census Bureau definition of less than 500 people per sq mi, measured by tract.)

[traininthedistance]

Small towns also have the urban and suburban divisions. Common features in a small town downtown area include a town square, a county courthouse or municipal offices, a post office, an (often unused) old single screen movie theater, the remains of an old shopping district that has long since been replaced by a suburban WalMart. And then on the fringes of the town, you have single family homes, often with large yards, and, in many cases, trailer parks.

There's a very distinctive small town downtown that exists just about everywhere in Minnesota that has a four digit population. It's basically like a strip mall, but with all local businesses, usually something like some real estate office, accounting or law firm, sometimes even a dentist, and also bars together. And usually some quirky gift shop type places. Even most of the suburbs have "downtowns" along the lines of this.

Small towns in southwest Minnesota also sometimes have a weird type of parking I've never seen anywhere else, basically instead of the standard parking lot you find in most strip malls or the diagonal parking you find at most of the type listed above, they instead have parking in the middle of the road and then you can walk to the businesses on either side. I have never seen it anywhere east or north of Mankato.

Not sure if this is exactly what you are talking about, but they do the parking in the center thing along Broad Street, which is a major road, in Philadelphia. It was very surprising to me the first time I saw it. Maybe some of the Philly area posters can comment further about this further.
http://goo.gl/maps/3ETng

Beat me to it.  I was thinking the exact same thing.

It's one of Philly's more... inexplicable traditions.