Sheffield blog

Stay healthy and be carbon-friendly too

The Sheffield version of an urban-routefinder/walking website has just launched, giving information for pedestrians wanting to find out the best way to walk between any two points in the city.

walkit.com plots the path between the two locations you specify and gives the profile, distance, time, calorie-burn and the carbon emissions saved by walking instead of using a vehicle. You can also choose a less-busy route.

Apparently it works best within a 5km radius of the city centre, as that’s where the creators put the most effort into adding pedestrian-specific pathways, for example through parks or along river walkways. You can use street names or post codes on the site and most points of interest should be recognised.

Google maps has a similar service, although it takes a bit longer to bring up your route. The advantage of the Google version is that once it has suggested a route, you can then drag it to modify it. At the moment, you can do this on walkit.com but only in a more basic way by specifying a ‘via’ location when you search.

The walkit.com route profile illustration is quite good, as it helps you work out the hills involved in your journey; it turns out that my route back home from work involves a climb of 100m. For comparison, I tested this route in both and they came out within 2 minutes of each other – 37 minutes for walkit.com and 39 minutes for Google maps.

So which would I use? For calculating walking routes, I’d go for walkit.com, as it is easier to get the information you need quickly, and in general I’d be more inclined to support a smaller company over Google.