Slacy’s Blog

The Drive Score website is now back online, so I can tell you:

1. Death Valley, CA gets a “7/100″ (If you can find someplace thats less drivable, let me know)
2. Area 51, NV gets an “8/100″
2. Pony, Montana gets a “12/100″
3. New York, NY gets an “83/100″ (NB: In real life, do you think New York is more or less ‘drive-able’ than Death Valley?)

Thinking about this site more, I now suspect that its just a straight javascript rip-off of the walkscore site. Lots of these types of mash-ups are only implemented in Javascript, and thus, are very easy to rip off and tailor to your own needs. I bet thats whats happened here.

So, I previously posted about the WalkScore website that gives a rating for how ‘walkable’ a location is. I thought it was a fun and interesting idea, and I like to think that being able to walk places from home is really great.

Today, a commenter on that post mentioned that there’s now a “Drive Score” website. It rates how “driveable” a location is. And, even better, it doesn’t seem like its just a joke.

NOTE: As of 12:30pm PST on 12/3/07, Drive score seems to be down. Their site says:

Sorry, Google is blocking requests from Drive Score because we are receiving too much traffic right now. We’re working with Google to resolve this issue. Please try back in one hour. Thanks for using Drive Score!

So, you may want to try their site later…

Am I the only one that thinks this is a ridiculous idea? I mean, isn’t everywhere drivable? BTW, we got a 76 out of 100, and the results look pretty silly. For example, it says that our nearest CVS is 34 miles away. I don’t dispute that, but we’ve got a Long’s Drugs that I think is under 1 mile away. Why CVS? Oh, and for “Railway Station” it says “Central Park Apartments” (we also live within walking distance of the Mountain View Caltrain station). For Home Depot it says “Verity Inc.” Maybe this site isn’t even worth mentioning here? Results are so bad as to be comical.

Anyway, its just something fun to pass the time, I guess.