--- title: "Changes to the scores and data · How Walkable" description: "Every change to How Walkable's method and data that moves a score, a ranking or what a page says, dated and newest first." url: https://howwalkable.com/changes updated: 2026-10-22 license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ --- 1. [Methodology](https://howwalkable.com/methodology) 2. Changes # Changes to the scores and data How Walkable's method and data change as problems are found and fixed. This page lists every change that moves a score, a ranking or what a page says, newest first. Places come from Overture Maps release 2026-09-23.1; the [methodology](https://howwalkable.com/methodology) describes the method as it stands. ## 22 October 2026 * Rankings cover every city of 300,000 people or more, down from 500,000. * A city's centre is the busiest point within 3 km of its GeoNames position, unless the busiest point within 3 km of its Wikidata position has at least half as many places again. GeoNames puts some cities away from downtown, so Toronto, Chicago, Ho Chi Minh City, Brasília, Quito, Baku and Parañaque are now measured from their downtowns, and Las Piñas is ranked as a city of its own. * Cities and neighbourhoods with the same rounded score share a rank, in every table and sentence, so every Paris neighbourhood that scores 100 is first. * Neighbourhoods are filed under the city they are in when Wikidata places them only in a region shared with it: Al Qusais, Al Twar and Muhaisnah moved from Sharjah to Dubai, and BF International Village from Parañaque to Las Piñas. * Lists of nearby places no longer name gold-loan lenders, insurers, investment firms, exchanges or central banks as banks, or bars as groceries. Such places still count towards the score, as they did before. * Neighbourhoods take the names people use: "Ipanema" rather than "Ipanema District", "Tennōji-ku" rather than "Tennōji Ward", and a numbered district drops its city's name where it reads as well without it: "11th arrondissement", "District V", "Zone 5". Old addresses redirect. * Country pages compare their cities with the rest of the world, ranking pages describe their top five neighbourhoods one by one, and a city page notes any everyday place notably further from its centre than in the median city ranked. * Cities take their English Wikipedia name where it reorders the name GeoNames gives: Bandar Baru Selayang rather than Selayang Baru Utara. Old addresses redirect. * A numbered district that holds a named quarter gives way to it, so Paris ranks Le Marais, the Latin Quarter and Saint-Germain-des-Prés rather than the arrondissements they lie in, and named places take pages before numbered districts. Old addresses redirect. * Parks are no longer ranked as neighbourhoods where Wikidata files them only as an administrative block, as with Tokyo's Kitanomaru Park. * A neighbourhood named after a district of its own city drops the district: Kızılay rather than "Kızılay, Çankaya". * A city's neighbourhoods get a ranking page of their own only when at least 8 are ranked; shorter lists stay on the city page. * City and neighbourhood maps are images of their own, at /maps/, with a description of what each shows, and each neighbourhood ranking has a map placing its neighbourhoods around the city's centre. * Cities are matched to the right Wikidata entry where a name was shared with a smaller place: Alicante rather than the Roman town of Lucentum, and Utrecht, Espoo, Graz and Cuenca rather than places of the same name. Minato is ranked as part of Wakayama, and Kalyan and Dombivli as Kalyan-Dombivli. Old addresses redirect. * Places that are part of a city are no longer ranked as cities of their own when Wikidata files them nowhere or as dissolved: Manukau City is part of Auckland, Setapak of Kuala Lumpur, Tseung Kwan O of Hong Kong, Ambattur of Chennai, and Thủ Dầu Một, Thuận An and Dĩ An, on its northern edge, of Ho Chi Minh City. Old addresses redirect. * Ranking pages describe each of their top five by what sets it apart from the other four: where it lies, the kind of everyday place it has most and least of, and its nearest. * The world ranking lists the 100 most walkable cities, with every city still on its country's page and in the CSV; countries with one or two ranked cities name them in the country list. Country pages with three or more cities show how many score in each band. * A neighbourhood Wikidata places in a city merged into a larger one as a near duplicate, as Caloocan is into Manila, is ranked with the larger city only within 10 km of its centre, so Caloocan's Barangay 169 is no longer ranked in Manila. * Place names cut short in the source data are shown to their last whole word and marked as shortened, or to the end of their first part where they list services after a "|". Lenders whose names say "Finserv" or "FinCorp" are no longer named as banks. * Rank sentences say where a rank is shared ("joint 2nd"), and answers naming the most walkable neighbourhoods name every one tied first, or how many tie. * Every Markdown page carries its description, date and licence, and leaves out the colour legend that only makes sense beside a map. * A neighbourhood that is its city's only ranked one shows how much of its area scores 70 or more, in place of a rank of 1 of 1. * Every page is also available as Markdown, at its address with `.md` added. ## 21 October 2026 * Rankings cover every city of 500,000 people or more, down from 1,000,000. * Each city's neighbourhoods are ranked on a page of their own, filed by where Wikidata places them. * Cities are named in English: Cologne rather than Köln. * Lists of nearby places name only places whose names fit their category, so a restaurant filed as a grocery is not shown as one. Every place still counts towards the score. ## 14 October 2026 * Neighbourhood pages, each scored across the area around its own centre. * The [accuracy study](https://howwalkable.com/accuracy), comparing scores with Walk Score at 46 addresses in the United States and Canada. ## 13 October 2026 * A city's score became the average over points 1 km apart across the 5 km around its centre, rather than the score at its centre alone, so it reflects how far walkability reaches. ## 12 October 2026 * Scores cover the whole planet. * Chain stores count in one category per brand, since map data often files their branches differently: a convenience chain such as OXXO no longer counts as a grocery. * Parks come only from land use, since park pins are often placed in towns for national parks miles away. Car dealers no longer count as shops. ## 11 October 2026 * How Walkable launched, scoring any address from 0 to 100 from Overture Maps places and OpenStreetMap streets. Scores, rankings and text by How Walkable (https://howwalkable.com), licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/); credit How Walkable and link to this page when reusing them.