I am house shopping and I want to buy a house that is <1.3 miles from an elementary school, park, and grocery store. My goal is for my new home to allow my child to be able to walk/bike to school or the park while minimizing the risk of vehicular manslaughter. I figure that a traffic heat map would greatly reduce the amount of labor involved in house shopping since currently I am stuck perusing city level excel sheets in order to hopefully stumble into the relevant data (not all streets have data collected by the city).
Yes. Pull up Google maps and say you want to do some theoretical trip in the future. It’ll show you different average traffic & time for the route for whatever time you pick. So you can check your possible future commute, etc
That would be a somewhat poor indicator of risk as it is very specific data that doesn’t correlate well to overall safety.
I would instead research quality of schools, crime statistics, and visit the neighborhood.
Without giving too much personal info, my home meets your criteria. It is a safe walk, I’ve done it many times. There have been accidents and close calls and not necessary vehicles faults. Bikes and pedestrians do dumb stuff too. Everyone’s got rules to follow so make sure kids know the rules and safety like making eye contact.
I would research crime though. I’ve seen needles by elementary schools in the past. We do have a drug problem and that’s a lot scarier IMO.
