Every listing says convenient location. This measures it.

Pick any address or ZIP code in the Orlando metro and you get one number from 0 to 100. It answers a single question: how close is this place to the things you use in an ordinary week? 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 farther out and on lifestyle closer in.

What Gets Counted

8 categories, in two groups. Essentials count for more the farther out you go; lifestyle counts for more the closer in. The distance beside each one is how near something has to be before the app calls it nearby.

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 Venues: 2 mi

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 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.

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 Address

There are no accounts here. An address you look up goes to OpenStreetMap's geocoder to become a point on the map, and is never 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.