Every listing says convenient location. This measures it.

Pick any place or ZIP code in the Orlando metro and you get one number from 0 to 100. Central Florida is built around the car, and this does not pretend otherwise. It answers a single question: how close is this place to the things you use in an ordinary week, so that the driving you do is short? Groceries, schools, a doctor, a park, somewhere to eat. Nothing else goes into it.

How the Number Is Built

Three steps, the same three for every place on this site.

Look Around the Address

Starting from the exact point on the map, the app collects every grocery store, school, clinic and the rest of the eight categories within reach of it, using map data from OpenStreetMap.
Measure How Far

In each category, the nearest few places count most and the ones farther out count less. Having a second and third option nearby still helps, so a street with three coffee shops beats a street with one.
Weigh It for the Kind of Place

Downtown and a rural road are not judged by the same list. The app works out whether an area is urban, suburban, exurban or rural, then leans on essentials in the thinner areas and on lifestyle in the dense ones.

What Gets Counted

8 categories, in two groups. The number beside each one is what counts as nearby for that kind of place: 1 mile for a coffee shop, 3 for a doctor.

Essentials

The things you cannot do without

Grocery Stores: 1.5 mi
Clinics and Hospitals: 3 mi
Public and Private Schools: 2 mi
Big-Box and Hardware Stores: 3 mi

Lifestyle

The things that make a place worth living in

Restaurants: 1 mi
Coffee Shops: 1 mi
Parks and Trails: 1 mi
Entertainment and Fitness: 2 mi

Why These Distances

These are sized for driving rather than for walking, and that is deliberate. Around here the question is not whether you will drive to the grocery store. It is how far. A place where the store is a mile and a half out and the doctor is three means a shorter errand every week than one where both are eight.

It is also why the distances are not all the same. Each one is about how far that kind of place can be before the distance starts to change how you live. A coffee shop two miles away is one you stop going to. A doctor three miles away is fine, because you go twice a year and you plan the trip.

A store just outside one of those distances does not stop counting. It fades out gradually instead, because a grocery store five miles away really is better than one eight miles away, even when both of them are a drive.

Reading the Score

A ZIP code and a single address are measured the same way, but they are not the same kind of thing, so they are not graded on the same curve.

ZIP Codes Are Ranked Against Each Other

Every scored ZIP code in the metro is lined up and split into fifths. A band says where a ZIP code sits among the others here.

On a ZIP page that reads as “Top Fifth in the Metro” down to “Bottom Fifth in the Metro”. A top-fifth ZIP code is the best of what is here, not the best anywhere.

An Address Is Graded on a Fixed Scale

A single address is not compared to other addresses. It gets a plain cutoff instead, because a ZIP code's score is an average across the whole ZIP code and one address is one point on the map. Expect an address to score a little above the ZIP code it sits in.

Well Served: 80 and above
Adequately Served: 60 to 79
Sparsely Served: Below 60

A ZIP code is not scored as one point. It is broken into the small neighborhoods the Census Bureau uses, each one is scored on its own, and the results are averaged with more weight where more people live. So a ZIP score describes the typical resident, not the best corner of the ZIP code.

What This Score Is Good For

Three things it is built to do.

Compare the Whole Metro at Once

Every scored ZIP code sits on one map, sorted and filtered however you like. All of them are measured from the same month of data by the same method, so the comparison is fair in a way that reading two descriptions side by side is not. It is a way to narrow four counties down to the few worth a closer look.

Check a Specific Place

Move the map to any point in the metro, the address on a listing or the one you live at now, and you get what is actually near it: which categories, how far away, and what the closest one is. It turns convenient location into a distance you can hold against your own week.

See the Tradeoff, Not Just the Number

Every score breaks apart into the 8 categories underneath it, so you can see what carries it and what sinks it. A place that scores low because restaurants are far is a different place from one that scores low because the nearest grocery store is.

What This Score Cannot Tell You

Three things it does not do.

It is not a livability score

Schools are counted as buildings, not graded. Crime, cost of living, traffic, flood risk and air quality are all absent.

It does not know what is any good

There are no ratings, review counts or stars anywhere on this site. The underlying map data has no opinion about quality, so a grocery store counts as a grocery store either way.

It is not a walkability score

Distance here is a straight line across the map, with no streets, sidewalks or crossings in it. It tells you how far something is, not whether you could walk there, and not how long the drive takes. Measuring a place on how walkable it is would rate most of this metro badly and tell you nothing you could act on. This measures how much driving it asks of you instead.

Coverage, Corrections and Privacy

Where It Covers

The Orlando–Kissimmee–Sanford metro area: Lake, Orange, Osceola and Seminole counties. A handful of ZIP codes inside it are left out, either because they are too small for the reference data to place a point inside them or because nobody lives there, such as the stretches of Walt Disney World with no residents. Those are gaps in the source data, not low scores.

How Current It Is

The map data comes from OpenStreetMap and is refreshed monthly. Every score records which month's data produced it.

If Something Looks Wrong

OpenStreetMap is maintained by volunteers, so a place is occasionally closed, moved or missing. If a score looks wrong for a neighborhood you know, email axel@axelrivera.com and tell me what is off. Knowing where the data is thin is worth more to this site than another feature.

What Happens to Your Searches

There are no accounts here. The point you pick goes to OpenStreetMap's geocoder to be given a street name, and a city you search for goes there to move the map. Neither is ever tied to you, shared or sold. Lookups are deleted automatically, and result pages have unguessable addresses, so nobody can browse what anyone else searched for.