Living Near a Coffee Shop Doesn’t Mean You’ll Walk to It

Do you know how ‘walkable’ your city actually is?

A new resource atlas from the Yale School of the Environment’s Livable City Lab distinguishes between walking and walkability. The National Walking Atlas — a free interactive tool that maps observed walking behavior at the census-tract level across 272 U.S. urban areas — lets users see where neighborhood residents walk more or less than their walkability score alone would suggest.

Faculty

Arianna Salazar-Miranda Assistant Professor of Urban Planning and Data Science

“I see it primarily as a diagnostic tool,” said Arianna Salazar-Miranda, assistant professor of urban planning and data science. “Walk Score already tells planners which neighborhoods have good amenity access. What the atlas adds is whether that access translates into walking and where the mismatch is largest.”

Walk Score has become the default shorthand for whether a neighborhood is pedestrian-friendly, baked into real estate listings and planning documents alike. But the study behind the atlas, led by Salazar-Miranda and published in Landscape and Urban Planning, compared an open-source walkability index modeled on Walk Score against anonymized GPS data tracking roughly 18 million devices across 272 U.S. urban areas.

The study's findings point to the road environment, street connectivity, and pedestrian-oriented design as features that shape whether proximity translates into walking.

“In practice, those are the kinds of interventions a planning department can implement more readily than large-scale land use or transit changes,” Salazar-Miranda said.

Part of the disconnect is that Walk Score-style indices are built to measure access to destinations such as shops, schools, and transit, but 69% of all walking trips in the data were recreational, meaning people walked and returned to where they started rather than walking somewhere in particular.

For that kind of walking, which depends more on parks, trails, and street-level comfort than on nearby amenities, proximity scores had essentially no predictive power.

The researchers suggest that a good index for recreational walking probably needs to take into account access to parks, greenways, and waterfronts, as well as how safe the street feels, the presence of sidewalks, and access to shade not just whether there are amenities at the end of the route.

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“Recreational walking is also social — people walk more when they see others walking,” she said. “This is more difficult to capture, but it’s probably an important factor in whether people decide to walk.”

Even when considering walking trips to an actual destination, which proximity does predict well, the researchers found that the surrounding built environment often determines whether people follow through. In neighborhoods with heavy traffic, disconnected streets, or buildings set far back from the sidewalk, the same level of amenity access produced far less walking than in neighborhoods with calmer streets, denser intersections, and buildings close to the road. In Chicago, for example, most neighborhood residents walked noticeably less than their amenity access would predict.

“Chicago and Philadelphia have some of the country’s most walkable historic cores, but their metros extend into neighborhoods with heavy traffic and disconnected streets,” Salazar-Miranda said. “Amenities are important but only one ingredient; street design is a key factor that determines whether people walk.”

The National Walking Atlas is available now.