How easily a place reaches everyday destinations on foot, scored at the grain of a neighbourhood rather than a whole borough. That way the texture within a place becomes visible, not just the difference between one town and the next.
Public accessibility statistics stop at the local authority level, which is far too coarse to see the street. The Access Index scores accessibility much finer, then checks itself against how people actually move.
Scored per small area, so a quiet estate and a busy high street read differently instead of averaging into one citywide number.
It tracks how people actually walked to work in the 2021 Census, a rank correlation near 0.67. Leave a whole city out of the fitting, score it cold, and the correlation holds.
How the index relates to deprivation is measured and shown on every view, using a colour-vision-safe palette. Never red, amber, green.
How walkable is a place, really? We built a finer-grained way to see it than public statistics allow.
Calibrated to how people walked to work in the 2021 Census (ρ ≈ 0.67), with its equity relationship measured and shown. Later cross-checked against the DfT's own 2025 connectivity metric across 105 councils, where it agreed closely (ρ ≈ 0.82). That check came after the model was built; the DfT metric was never used in the fitting.
Neighbourhood-grain scores across 100+ local authorities, the validated ones live on the map and more arriving as they clear checks. Each place reads on its own scale; there's no cross-city league table.
Pedestrian-environment quality: pavements, crossings, severance. This is the part of walkability an access index doesn't yet capture.
A blind field audit across cities, scored by independent raters. That is what it takes to call it a walkability index honestly.
The Access Index already scores accessibility at neighbourhood level across 100+ local authorities, validated against the 2021 Census and independently consistent with the DfT's own 2025 connectivity metric across 105 councils. That's a solid baseline, but it isn't yet a full walkability picture: it doesn't see pavements, crossings or severance. That's what we're building next.
We're choosing the first local authorities to bring it to. If you'd want the index for your area, a desk-study layer now and a fuller walkability tool as it develops, tell us what you're working on.
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