• Posted August 19, 2025

People Do Get More Steps In Walkable Cities, Study Finds

Cities can be designed in ways that promote walking, providing residents with built-in health benefits, a new study says.

People who live in more walkable cities do indeed get more daily steps, researchers reported Aug. 13 in the journal Nature.

Average steps increase or decrease by about 1,100 per day when people move between cities that promote or inhibit walking, researchers found.

“Our study shows that how much you walk is not just a question of motivation,” lead researcher Tim Althoff, an associate professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington in Seattle, said in a news release. “There are many things that affect daily steps, and the built environment is clearly one of them.”

Prior studies have shown that for every 1,000 extra daily steps a person gets, their risk of death decreases by 15%, researchers said in background notes.

For the study, the research team analyzed data from users of a step-tracking app called Argus between 2013 and 2016.

Specifically, the team compared the steps of more than 5,400 people who moved one or more times between 1,600 cities in the United States, pulled from an overall data set of 2.1 million Argus users.

“Some of our prior work suggested that our physical, built environment makes a big difference in how much we move, but we couldn’t produce particularly strong evidence showing that was the case,” Althoff said.

“The large data set we worked with for this new study gave us a unique opportunity to produce this strong, compelling evidence that our built environments do indeed causally impact how much we walk,” he added.

All the cities had been assigned a walk score between 0 to 100, based on their comparative walkability. For example, Seattle has a score of 74, meaning it is “very walkable,” researchers said.

Across all the relocations, when the walk score rose or fell by more than 48 points, average steps increased or decreased by about 1,100 daily steps, results show. 

However, people’s steps remained about the same when they moved between cities with similar walk scores, researchers said.

For example, 178 people in the study moved between New York City – walk score 89 – and different cities with an average walk score of 48.

This group’s average daily stops rose by 1,400 upon moving to New York, from 5,600 to 7,000, researchers said. But people who left New York to less walkable cities wound up with 1,400 fewer steps.

“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,” Althoff said.

However, researchers said more study is needed to prove a cause-and-effect link between a city’s walkability and the number of steps residents take. Even though this paper provided the strongest evidence to date, it could only show an association.

More information

Harvard Medical School has more on the health benefits of walking.

SOURCE: University of Washington, news release, Aug. 13, 2025

What This Means For You

People who like to walk might consider moving to a city with a higher walk score.