How Much Walking Should You Do in a Walkable Neighborhood?

Walkability is a current planning trend that has implications for public health, traffic, land use planning, zoning, parks and pretty much everything we like about cities. All else equal, cities should favor more walkability over less walkability. Too often planners and urbanists narrowly define walkability as the ability to walk to places where they like to spend money*, and we should think more broadly about what walkable means for all types of folks, but in most cases more walking is better than less walking.

Say you live in a walkable community where you can do most of your errands on foot. How much might you walk on any given day? How much should you walk? Paul Krugman weighed in on this question on his blog. He notes that he walks about 15,000 steps per day, and this is "fairly easy to do." Since most people take about 2,000 steps per mile, he's covering about 7.5 miles daily. This is hard to do!

I posit that if you are walking 7.5 miles daily to go about your business you are not in a walkable community. Mabe farmers and ranchers cover that kind of ground, but at that distance your daily activities are too spread out for easy walking. That distance covered daily is getting close to the hunter-gather period where humans walked 3,000-4,000 miles annually.

An realistic pace for walking is about three miles per hour. This means that 7.5 miles is about 2.5 hours of travel per day, not including subway, bus, taxi, etc. It is certainly doable, but not simply by going about your business. You have to want to do it, and be able to afford to do it. Walking is a leisure good if your income is high enough. You can buy more enjoyable and slower travel and work a bit less. Most people don't have this option, however.

But how much walking is the right amount for a walkable community? I'm not sure, but one place to start is with established travel time budgets of around 90 minutes of total travel per day. This suggests walking about 4.5 miles daily, which is less than the doctor recommended 10,000 steps.  I'm not sure this is right or wrong (it is probably too high as carrying things while walking or traveling with children limits how far and how fast you can go), but a good place to start when evaluating walkable communities. People should be able to take care of their daily business by walking less than five miles per day.  If you use transit and live and work within 1/2 mile of your stops, then your commute includes two miles of walking. As the average person takes less than four trips per day total (Table 3 in this summary of NHTS data, and I realize that national data may not accurately reflect trip totals for denser areas) it seems unlikely that a couple more trips will lead to a few more miles, unless your destination are really far apart.

In sum, to make a community walkable it must have lots of things close together. The closer together these things are, the fewer miles traveled it takes to get to them. So the most walkable places are those where people can access the most while walking the least. If you are walking 2.5 miles per day for all of your activities--which is about what I average about forty blocks north of where Paul Krugman lives (somewhere on the Upper West Side as I understand)--then walking places is easy.

Since each mile is associated with about 100 calories burned, we should also temper our expectations that the marginal increase in walking will offset the increase in calories recently seen. Five miles daily is not enough to offset fancy coffee drinks, sports drinks or even eating out a couple of times per week.

So walking is good and we should encourage more of it through design, mixed uses and street redesign. We should also keep in mind that too much walking suggests that our communities are not actually that walkable and people walk a lot because they can. To be truly walkable people should be able to reach all of their destinations without walking far. Ultimately, however, if we really want people to walk more the best thing to do is get everybody a dog.




*Central Park is one of the best places in Manhattan to walk, but for the most part you just walk about and enjoy your company, the trees, turtles, an occasional bird, etc. Central Park is not a great place to walk because you want to have lunch at the Boathouse. Fancy people take a shuttle there.

I Walk A Lot, I Just Don't Walk Much

I live in Manhattan and walk just about everywhere I go. I walk to work, the grocery store, my son's day care, most errands, out to dinner, plus other regular and infrequent places I go. Since we (unnecessarily and counter-productively) label people by their transport modes, I am a Walker.

Now, my life isn't very exciting, but I do things sometimes. But while I walk a lot, I really don't walk much. Over the past week I have used the Moves app on my phone, which tracks distance covered, time spent traveling, steps taken, and other aspects of personal travel.  It's not perfectly accurate, but fairly close. It does not record my vertical transportation, mostly the stairs that I take. I probably walk up and down about 15-20 flights of stairs daily.  Here is a table describing how much I walked each day over the past week (the Friday is incomplete, but I won't be walking far to get home in a bit). So I average 2.2 miles of walking daily, though this is somewhat inflated by my activities last weekend. Saturday and Sunday featured not only my regular walks to and from my office on the Columbia campus, but walking to the D train to go to Yankee Stadium for a couple of baseball games. Monday, with the most walking, was a regular work day plus I met a friend for dinner in the Flatiron District. To get there I took the D train again, but south. Since it was a nice night I got off at Herald Square and walked down Broadway to about 20th. Then afterward I walked to 14th and 7th to get the 1 train home. These routes added a lot of extra walking and in no way represent the fastest or walking-minimized travel.

So what's the point? There are a couple from my anecdotes. First, it is really hard to walk great distances as part of normal daily activities. Even when people go out of their way to walk more, as I often do, it doesn't necessarily increase the distance traveled or calories burned that much. Because walking is slow, you just don't travel that far. Second, for planning, this means that density and mixing of uses is critical--as we well know--but also that weight related health benefits--e.g. calories burned--may be limited. The kicker is that the denser and more mixed the built environment is the less distance people will cover on foot. In my week described here I never walked enough to burn off a sweetened iced coffee, if I drank those. Here is a video of what 200 calories looks like, which is about the daily average calories I burned last week through my regular walking.

Walkable communities are sorely needed in our cities, but in the best walkable areas people don't walk all that far. We should plan for and encourage walkability because people like it, and we should be skeptical that a walkable built environment will do much for obesity, though there are other health benefits.

Walking and the Life of the City Symposium

Here is the abstract to my paper I'm presenting at tomorrow's Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management at New York University "Walking and the Life of the City Symposium." Details here.

Planning for Pedestrians within Multi-modalism: A Normative Framework

Abstract

            It is well known aphorism that all transit riders are also pedestrians. Transit stations are planned and built with this truth in mind, though with varying degrees of success for increasing ridership and pedestrian activities.  Though all transit riders are pedestrians is a matter of fact, addressing the pedestrian environment subsequent to transit suggests a casualty that may not be appropriate. A more accurate explanation of the transit rider-pedestrian relationship is that many pedestrians are also transit riders. By focusing on planning and creating walkable communities first demand for transit can guide new transit services and offer true mobility enhancements to pedestrians.

            In this research I examine “chicken and egg” problems with transit investment, specifically with regard to the development of walkable communities. In this I argue that planners should not confuse a premium for walkable communities with a concurrent premium for transit oriented communities. There are multiple reasons for rethinking the relationship between walking and transit investment. Transit is well suited to managing commute trips, and depending on the vehicle technology either short or long commutes. Though transit mode share is quite low as a share of overall travel, as a share of commute trips into and out of the Central Business Districts transit does quite well in cities across the country. Where transit does especially poorly is for non-work trips, which comprise nearly 80 percent of total travel in the United States. It is these non-work trips that also offer the greatest opportunities for increasing walking and non-motorized travel.

            I argue that the largest problem facing pedestrian planning and investment is in financing any investments.  However, the main problem of finance is not one of inadequate resources (though this can be a problem) but one of decoupled revenue generation from expenditure. As pedestrian investment improves local property values property taxes and assessments should be used to finance any improvements. This is not simply for economic efficiency but if pedestrian improvements are financed by gas taxes then officials also have strong incentives and requirements to also improve automobility.

            This research also examines policy approaches to re-orient transport planning to give pedestrians priority over other modes. Local policies that dramatically affect the pedestrian environment include the supply and location of off-street parking, street widths and classifications and sidewalk maintenance. Additionally, efforts to use the Americans with Disabilities Act to improve pedestrian access for all are evaluated. The paper concludes with policy recommendations—some practical and some radical—based on a normative approach to pedestrian planning and multi-modalism.

Talking About Walking, Plus Bonus Links!

Christopher Hawthorne is writing a series of pieces in the LA Times about the boulevards of Los Angeles. The first piece is about Atlantic Boulevard. The story is here and includes some nice interactive pieces. From the story:

The boulevard, in fact, is where the Los Angeles of the immediate future is taking shape. No longer a mere corridor to move cars, it is where L.A. is trying on a fully post-suburban identity for the first time, building denser residential neighborhoods and adding new amenities for cyclists and pedestrians.
In the process, the city is beginning to shed its reputation as a place where the automobile is king — or at least where its reign goes unchallenged. Cities across the U.S. followed L.A.'s car-crazy lead in the postwar era. This time around we might provide a more enlightened example: how to retrofit a massive region for a future that is less auto-centric.
Especially among younger Angelenos, including foreign-born immigrants and transplants from other American cities, there is a hunger for better-designed roadways and new ways of getting around. And L.A.'s political leadership is finally responding.

A point to consider is that public policies are responsive to market demand just like real estate development and blue jeans. Public officials are interested in supplying the types of projects and facilities that improve their chances of getting re-elected. Up until recently one way to up the electoral odds was to maximize external funding for large scale construction and subsidy because the officials could always claim employment benefits. External money gets funneled to projects that voters value, but also reflect the funding priorities of the funding agency (in transport this is often federal). What is happening in LA now reflects local finance in many cases, primarily through Measure R.

The city (and county) is reacting to voter demands for quality of life improvements rather than strictly mobility improvements. In many cases what LA is doing with their boulevards is extremely hard to do with federal money for a few reasons including over-reliance on travel time savings and a focus on mobility over accessibility.  Planning transportation as a quality of life concern has great potential for positive change and better financing models. I'll be presenting some recent work of mine along these lines ate the "Walking and the Life of the City" Symposium on June 7 at NYU Wagner's Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management. Details here.


Somewhat related, here are some thoughts from Erin Chantry from last week's CNU meetings, where walking was a major topic of conversation.

And this post by David Levinson about Bay Area density and urban economics should be required reading. A lot of the "all density all the time" urbanism misreads or overstates much from urban economics models.

Salt Lake City Moves to Criminalize Walking

Salt Lake City, commonly used as a successful example of light rail transit (more here, critical thoughts here and here), has decided that the best way to ensure future success is to make distracted walking illegal. From the Salt Lake Tribune:

The new ordinance says examples of walking while distracted include — but are not limited to — talking on cellphones, listening to music with headphones, texting, "attending to personal hygiene" or reading newspapers or magazines while crossing tracks.

But board member Troy Walker, a defense attorney, questioned the wisdom of it. "I struggle with criminalizing everyday conduct," he said. "We’re going to make it a crime to have your headphones in walking along crossing the tracks. Does it really make us safer?

I've only been to Salt Lake City once since their light rail was built, but one thing that was really weird about downtown  was a complete lack of traffic. No rush hour, no congestion, no honking. Just wide, empty streets. The streets seemed emptier than they actually were because they are so wide (the roads are required to be 132 feet across in order to turn around a wagon team without "resorting to profanity"). A potential consequence of the lack of activity, be it auto, transit, bike or pedestrian, is that there really isn't much reason to pay attention to where you  are going. You are not likely to run into anything, except the occasional train, which is obviously catastrophic. The solution to the problem of distracted walking is not to criminalize walking, but rather to increase the number of pedestrians and activity on the street. That will encourage people to pay attention.