Put another way, only Westville offers an alternative to driving. Look how many houses and small streets surround Westville. This makes it at least possible to leave the bar without getting in a car at all. You could conceivably walk to Buffalo Wild Wings just like you could conceivably walk through barbed wire or a swamp. My point is that it is far from practical. As I point out in a moment there are multiple barriers to getting home safely without a car. There is little you would be likely to walk home to unless you were staying in the Hampton Inn. Even if you did walk you would have to deal with car spaced distances and poor infrastructure. Take, for example, the brambles that surround the site like a barb-wire fence and lack of sidewalks.

If we Do The Math and try to put numbers to this comparison we can start to see the difference. As a simple metric we can take the relative Walkscores of the two sites. Wild Wings is a modest 52 (somewhat walkable) while Westville is 82 (very walkable). I, once again, call out to MADD to consider the inverse of bar Walkscores a measure of drunk-driving potential. In reality, the disparity is far greater than Walkscore is able to process. This is the composite score which under-weights things like terrain and infrastructure and assumes that any address you type in is residential.

Another way to compare the sites is to consider how many people could walk home in half an hour. In theory Buffalo Wild Wings could get you as far as downtown or Kenilworth in half an hour but this is unlikely. The travel time fails to take into account the kind of dangerous roads you would be walking (e.g. no sidewalks, lack of light), the mountain you would be climbing, or the tunnel you would be walking through. Furthermore, as you can see in a wider aerial view, there are few non-commercial areas within range. Most of what you can walk to, ironically, is more surface parking. Westville’s compact, gridded (comparatively) design, by contrast, gives it access to basically all of West Asheville.