Walkability Map of Listowel, Ontario: Cartastrophe or a Good Start?

A walkable community is one where all services and amenities are close at hand to residential areas (or integrated into residential areas in mixed use development), eliminating the need to use or ideally to even own a vehicle. The benefits of such walkable neighbourhood arrangements to our health, the environment and our communities are obvious:

• It's been shown that residents of pedestrian-friendly neighbourhoods are healthier and weigh less than their sprawling neighbourhood counterparts, and because of driving less suffer few car accidents.
• The environmental problems associated with vehicle emissions are no secret nowadays: poor air quality, greenhouse gases and global warming. Designing lower emission vehicles, despite all the hype and marketing from car companies, is not the solution. (Is smoking light cigarettes a good idea? No, kick the habit!) Well designed towns and cities that eliminate our reliance on vehicles and fossil fuels are what's desperately needed. Walking and cycling are zero-pollution means of transportation.
• Compactness and density are essential conditions for a walkable neighbourhood. A higher population density makes public transportation and bicycle infrastructure feasible. Bus and rail routes and bike paths/lanes can serve a greater number of people. Dense, walkable neighborhoods also provide local businesses with increased foot traffic, allowing them to thrive. Not having to drive between destinations allows pedestrians to stop at more stores/restaurants/theaters/etc.
• A walkable neighbourhood promotes face-to-face interaction and community involvement. Instead of being couped up in a vehicle en route, isolated from the world, the morning commute could be a bike ride alongside a neighbour or a trip to the grocery store a short walk in the fresh air, encountering friends along the way.

Now, on to the map. It's quite simplistic and possibly full of cartographic faux pas', being a first attempt, but it hopefully conveys the message with as little confusion as possible. I used Quantum GIS to put together the map, a free to download desktop GIS application. The whole process was quite instructive, having never done it before. I searched for and downloaded the datasets, chose an appropriate (hopefully) projection for my area of interest (UTM, Zone 17N), imported the layers into QGIS and decided on color schemes, transparency, and other design concerns. I also made use of the "buffer" function to create an area around the town's bike paths to be displayed -- a linear park essentially -- and to create 500m radius "walkability" circles around the supermarkets and schools, two of the most frequented locations in a daily routine. Rather than using buffer circles which don't account for the actual layout of roads, a walking time cost analysis showing along-street displacement times from the location in question would have been more appropriate. Unfortunately that's still over my head at this point, and I'm not certain that QGIS has that capability. Well, here it is...

Click here for a larger image.
Comments and criticisms welcome.