Yes, Walkable Cities Lead People to Walk More

An excellent new study in Nature points us to a nudge that really does work. Walkable cities really do lead people to walk more. In fact, when people move to a more walkable city from a less walkable one, researchers found that they walk an average of about 1,100 more steps every day. The reverse is also true. Upon moving to a less walkable city, people walk less every day. Now that’s a meaningful nudge. An extensive body of research tells us that a thousand extra steps daily can have real health benefits.

The authors of this study, let by Tim Althoff at Stanford, write that this could be quite important:

“Our findings suggest that designing built environments to be more activity-friendly could have significant effects on the physical activity of large populations, and serve as a powerful complement to interventions that focus on changing behaviour at the individual level.”

These results are compelling to us, because the authors rely upon a natural experiment to provide evidence of a causal relationship in their observations.

What Is a Walkable City?

Walkability is simply a measure of how friendly an area is for pedestrians. The presence of sidewalks, ease of access to destinations, and the overall safety and comfort of walking contribute to walkability. It’s  all about creating environments where people can easily walk to the places they want to go and not rely on cars. For the purpose of this study, researchers used the openly available and systematically developed Walk Score.

This is a reminder that healthy behaviors are not entirely a matter of choice. Althoff explains it nicely:

“Our study shows that how much you walk is not just a question of motivation. There are many things that affect daily steps, and the built environment is clearly one of them. There’s tremendous value to shared public infrastructure that can really make healthy behaviors like walking available to almost everybody, and it’s worth investing in that infrastructure.”

Click here for the study in Nature, here and here for further reporting on it.

Steps of the Palace at Versailles, painting by Henri Eugène Le Sidaner / Wikimedia Commons

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August 14, 2025