What’s New in Psychology

Want to Walk More? Live in a Walkable City    

Jim Windell

            A little over a year ago when we moved to South Haven, Michigan, for my wife Jane’s new job, we bought a house a half mile from the downtown area. At the time, we thought that being so close to a vibrant downtown would be great. We could walk into town to do our banking, go to the library and the post office, stop in to the Center for the Arts, go shopping, and walk to any one of a dozen restaurants.

            So, after a year, do we walk into town and do all those things we originally envisioned?

            The answer is a resounding yes.

            The Friday before I wrote this is a typical example of one day in our walking life. Early in the morning, I walked our two dogs around our neighborhood for 20 minutes. Just before noon, I walked into town to pick up a copy of the local newspaper, stop in to see two shop owners I’ve gotten to know, and check in at a market to get my wife a cup of vanilla latte. Just after 5:00 pm, Jane and I walked to the bank and talked to Pablo, our favorite teller, while we withdrew cash for the weekend.

            We then walked the 10 blocks to the American Legion post where we bought a taco dinner and sat on the bluff overlooking the Black River watching boats come off of Lake Michigan while we ate. Once finished, we walked back to the United Methodist Church in town to go to a classical music concert. After the concert we walked over to the South Pier Creamery to get ice cream cones. Then, we walked the half mile home.

            There’s no question that when we lived in the suburbs of Oakland County, we didn’t walk anywhere. We always had to drive to get to any where we wanted to go.

            Are we atypical? Or do other people who move to walkable towns or cities end up walking more?

            Fortunately, a recent study took a look at this question.

            But first, a reminder about the benefits of walking.

            Study after study shows that walking is very good for you. A 2023 study found that even 4,000 steps a day reduces your mortality risk. And for each 1,000 extra daily steps above that, your risk decreases by 15%.

            Now, about that study.

            Led by researchers at the University of Washington and using data from the Argus step-tracking app, the authors compared the steps per day of 5,424 people who moved one or more times among 1,609 cities in the U.S. Across all relocations, when the Walk Score rose or fell more than 48 points, average steps increased or decreased by about 1,100 per day. But when people moved between similarly walkable cities, their steps stayed about the same. These findings held across people of different ages, genders and body mass indexes.

           For instance, the study tracked 178 people who moved to New York City (Walk Score 89) from different cities with an average score of 48. This group’s average daily steps rose by 1,400 upon moving to New York, from 5,600 to 7,000. Moves from New York to less walkable cities showed the inverse: People averaged 1,400 fewer steps.

           According to lead author Tim Althoff, a University of Washington associate professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, “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. 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.”

           Working with an anonymized data set from 2.1 million people who used the Argus app between 2013 and 2016, the team pulled a subset who had moved and stayed in their new location for at least three months. They normalized for demographics and changes in seasons. They also filtered out days with fewer than 500 steps or more than 50,000, as well as days around moves.

           The greatest change in walking the study observed was in the moderate intensity range (100 to 130 steps per minute). Moves that increased Walk Scores more than 49 points were associated with twice as many subjects recording at least 150 minutes of aerobic activity per week, the recommended minimum.

           Althoff stressed that while the study provides the strongest evidence to date, no data set is truly representative of the whole U.S. population. For instance, the subjects in this study had all downloaded a step-counting app, which can affect results.

           “Our study shows that how much you walk is not just a question of motivation,” Althoff said. “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.”

           The study, which was recently published in Nature, provides clear evidence that highly walkable areas lead to significantly more walking. So, if you’re going to move, consider moving to a walkable city.

           To read the journal article, find it with this reference:

Althoff, T., Ivanovic, B., King, A. C., Hicks, J. L., Delp, S. L., & Leskovec, J. (2025). Countrywide natural experiment links built environment to physical activity. Nature, 1-7.