
Why People in Cities Walk Fast (2012) - vinnyglennon
https://www.citylab.com/life/2012/03/why-people-cities-walk-fast/1550/
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xyzzy123
I think it would be interesting to see not just the average but also the
_distribution_ of walking speeds. I posit the effect might just be “number of
people walking to/from work or arrival time sensitive activity.”, with
“average age” and “adoption of mass transit” as significant factors.

(Mass transit because you’re more likely to see commuters! Outside big cities
you will measure fewer people walking to work, because they drove).

So, strongly correlated with economic activity and cultural factors around
timeliness, but no deep psychological explanation required.

I walk fast in the city when I’m going to/from work or trying to get somewhere
on my break.

I _don’t_ walk as fast on the weekends, and tourists in the city certainly
seem to be in no particular hurry (at least, it seems that way when stuck
behind them clogging up the footpath).

~~~
dagw
I think there's a secondary aspect here as well. I walk a lot and always have.
And while I almost never feel I need to walk 'fast', I've observed that my
comfortable walking pace is a lot faster than most people I know who don't
walk every day, even when I'm in no particular hurry.

~~~
Merem
I can confirm it and have to add that it's the same with riding my bike.
Moving at a "normal" speed becomes even somewhat hard when with other people
who always tell you to slow down (because when you are not paying attention,
you are already speeding up again).

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ken
I'm surprised they don't mention the obvious practical reason. I walk faster
when I'm in the city because I have farther to go.

Last week, I was working in a smaller city 30 miles out. So I drove, and out
in the suburbs, I can park pretty close to where I'm going.

Today, I was working in the city, a mile from home. At that distance, there's
a good chance I wouldn't be able to find parking any closer to where I'm
going! So I walk, and that's a decent amount of ground to cover.

Smaller city means better parking, so you don't need to walk as far. When you
get really small (like Psychro), things are naturally close enough together
you don't need to walk far at all.

I'd look not just at how long it takes people to cover 50 feet, but the
starting/ending points for their entire trips. I bet when people take optimal
modes of transportation for their routes, their trips simply require more
walking in bigger cities.

~~~
benj111
"a mile from home. At that distance, there's a good chance I wouldn't be able
to find parking any closer to where I'm going"

Would you drive, just to travel a mile? Barely seems worth it in the best
case. That's without getting into the environmental and social issues.

~~~
setr
If parking were easily available & free, then whats the downside? 15 min + a
bit of effort versus 5 min and no effort... and you have the convenience of
having a car nearby for your next thing (eg lunch).

The choice seems obvious to me.

~~~
benj111
That 15 minute walk will always take 15 minutes, whereas that 5 minute drive
may turn out to be a 15 minute space hunt, so you still have to set off at the
same time.

So unless you're travelling somewhere afterwards, where's the upside?

~~~
setr
One of my favorite ideas about selecting a major for college is that, if you
don’t know what you want to do, you should select the option that gives the
most freedom for when you do decide.

Eg a math major can transfer to just about any engineering field with little
cost, but its harder to go from say CS to a math major. Philosophy might apply
to anything, while art history is quite limited in application elsewhere.

In the same fashion, you should not ask “unless you’re travelling elsewhere”,
but rather, “unless you’re planning not to travel elsewhere”; the car gives
you both options. You’ve essentially not made a decision regarding travel.
Walking otoh does make a decision on the matter (at 15 minutes extra, outside
lunch is less appealing; at 20-30, its likely unviable).

Thus, in this particular regard, driving needs no justification, but walking
does.

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peterwwillis
The whole thing seems like a hammer looking for a nail. It's clear from every
study quoted that there were always multiple factors that changed the results,
and they were trying to find one "overall" factor, but even that was limited.

For example, most of the "walking speed" measurements are done in "downtown
locations". Most cities are not made up of downtown locations, downtown is one
location in the city, so the measurements only indicate why people walk fast
_in downtown locations_.

They also quote other factors that change the results, like environment, and
culture. So basically the results change for any cities that aren't identical.
And they're trying to use a national metric (GDP) to relate to walking speed
in individual cities, when it's obvious that walking speed is going to relate
more to local economic metrics, not national.

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mmPzf
I remember reading this. I also remember reading a compelling argument that
the conclusions drawn by those studies were wrong, and that the actual cause
for the difference in walking speed is age. People in big cities tend to be
younger (due to urban migration, and whatnot), and with lower age comes faster
walking speed.

I can't remember where that argument was made, and I never fact checked it, so
take it with a grain of salt. However, it seems much more convincing than the
'pace of life' argument.

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rossdavidh
Doesn't it seem like somewhere out there is a company with a lot of data on
people's walking speed, which could just bury these studies with orders of
magnitude more data? Some smartphone app or similar device for counting steps,
or maybe just Google Maps when you're using the pedestrian option to plot your
path.

~~~
kwhitefoot
Google has a lot of data from the Google Maps timeline and also from Google
Fit.

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burfog
Muggers consistently choose targets based on how they walk. This is shown to
be the case even if other physical information is hidden during the research:

[http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20131104-how-muggers-size-
up...](http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20131104-how-muggers-size-up-your-walk)

To avoid attack, move with "synchrony and energy", with purpose. The city
people are doing exactly this.

~~~
jasonkester
I just realized that I walk this way whenever I'm traveling in an unfamiliar
place and find that I've chosen a route through a sketchy part of town.

I'll walk straight through at a brisk pace with a little bit of a scowl on my
face as though I'm annoyed to have to be crossing this _same_ area of town
_again_ and none of these f'ng people had better get in my f'ng way.

Now I know why I do that.

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creddit
OT, but a sentence that struck me as weird:

> Interestingly, Wiseman clocked some of the quickest feet in Singapore,
> China, and Brazil — perhaps a reflection of these rising economies.

Sure, China can obviously be considered rising. Brazil; sure why not? But
Singapore? That economy already rose a long time ago. The have one of the
highest GDP PPP per capita in the world and have reached convergence. How odd.

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INTPenis
I'm fairly certain why I walk fast in a city and it's because of the lights
and buses. In certain parts of downtown you turn into a video game character
because you've learned how all the crosswalk lights work, how the traffic
flows.

So if I see that I might make a green light if I walk faster I start to speed
up, and then I catch myself maybe 20 meters after the light and slow down.

Same with trying to avoid bicycle paths and catch buses.

It's all one big video game and it raises your pace significantly. I often
catch myself walking faster than I intended and make an effort to slow down.

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anotheryou
Maybe it's just how many people are late for work/appointments they measure.
Travel time is less predictable in the city.

But actually I think it's a mix: more dates in peoples lifes, wanting to flee
the noise (little joy in transit on foot), false urgency to catch public
transit because murphies lets you remember all the times you just so missed
the tram, as noted by others: more transit by foot in the city in general
because of public transport.

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hnruss
I walk faster in the city because there are more people who are walking faster
and if I walk slower, they will walk around me, which is more annoying in the
city due to the closeness by which people walk. If people kept a respectable
distance behind me regardless of my pace, and didn’t try to push past me, I
probably wouldn’t walk faster in the city.

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theriddlr
I live in Bristol, UK. I walk fast because I know where to go and because I
have lots of errands to run. Another reason is to avoid beggars and charity
muggers (chatty fundraisers hired by charities to approach people on the
street and ask them to make a cash donation/recurring donation) from chatting
me up because I appear busy.

~~~
Balero
I walk slow because some tourists have stopped to take a photo of a Banksy
again. And also because of hills.

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frumiousirc
> "The resulting correlation between walking speed and population was
> strikingly linear"

> (plot with logarithmic axis)

/me closes tab

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arandr0x
It would be interesting to relate this to how stimulating the environment is.
I walk fast in cities because doing so lets my brain "compress" the
information from the never ending shop windows, people yelling, people
walking, cars honking, people asking for money, ambient music, street names,
landmarks, camera flashes etc. I also walk very fast in malls for this reason.
(A correlate is --yes-- I actually walk slower at night, because there is more
to pay attention to at night.) It's possible that fast walking is an
adaptation to decrease the neurological load from the stimuli economic
activity generates (or even a consequence of the fact that exciting things
prime the brain towards moving and make physical action more desirable), and
not a consequence of "how much your time is worth".

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rikkus
Opinion on factors based on introspection:

\- Desire to shorten the parts of the commute where I can’t read a book (on my
phone)

\- Desire to shorten the commute in general to maximise time at home or work
(day is more relaxed if you arrive earlier)

\- Have a set of transport departure times in mind, for the optimal ‘smooth’
journey and want to be sure to arrive early enough to guarantee not missing
these. Lowers stress.

\- Brisk walking raises heart rate and brings endorphins

\- Everyone else walks at this speed. To deviate makes it harder for the
person deviating as they aren’t working with the ‘flow’.

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baxtr
I don’t buy this. It seems they’ve tested one potential explanation only, GDP.
What about the size of the city per se or mean walking distant between
objects? As example: Berlin is a city which is not compact and quite spread
out. What if people just need to walk quicker there to make it to work on
time? I am not saying this is true. But I want to make a point that you could
come up with other things to test easily.

~~~
TomMarius
Why would people go fast in dense cities, then?

"Interestingly, Wiseman clocked some of the quickest feet in Singapore, China,
and Brazil — perhaps a reflection of these rising economies."

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dm33tri
They walk faster but still slow. I'm amazed by how little they care for
others. You can't cut them in front because they are fast and don't see you,
you can't pass them from behind because they are slow and don't see you. (Same
goes for many cyclists. Only car drivers seem to care about surroundings and
their speed.)

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pimmen
Cities have more young people and a higher proportion of women than rural
areas (women are more likely to walk or use public transportation than men).
The researchers have t6o do better than just look at two variables, see that
they correlate and jump right to drawing conclusions.

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sonnyblarney
They are more likely to be commuters, have jobs and need to be somewhere.

I'm originally from a small town and everything is slower there, not just
walking.

Time is processed differently.

Also - consider if they did the same measurement in a city, but out in the
burbs? I'll be you find most people not so fast.

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de_watcher
In crowded environments when you go slow you feel bad that you're making
people go around you. So your speed naturally climbs to the speed of the
faster people. Even if there are few of them the overall speed will increase.

Subways just have flow speeds.

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viburnum
Jan Gehl measures walking speed in his studies of how people public space.
There's a hundred little factors that go into making a place walkable. And of
course people who walk a lot are in better shape and can walk faster.

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Reason077
In big cities, walking is transportation. So the faster the better.

In small towns, walking is, for the most part, a recreational or social
activity.

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fouc
Climate matters a lot. You're not likely to walk nearly as fast in Bangkok.

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scirocco
Related book recommendation: A geography of time

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nmstoker
In Canary Wharf, being a well off part of London, the speed of walking was
traditionally quite quick, however there has been a prolonged yet steady slow
down. It could easily be a spurious factor but it feels like it goes hand in
hand with the trend towards hiring more pliant, less imaginative people!

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burfog
They speculate about all sorts of factors, such as sensory overload and the
monetary value of time, trying to tease them apart, while ignoring danger.

Right at the top of the article, the photo of rapidly walking people is taken
on London Bridge. That is where people were run down in 2017. Of course people
would want to get through that area as fast as possible.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_London_Bridge_attack](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_London_Bridge_attack)

~~~
stinkyball
The same didn't happen during the IRA campaigns. Are you supposing that the
people of London are scared ? I'm fairly sure that people in London walk fast
as they have busy lives, not because they think walking fast will increase
their likelihood of survival. Perhaps the behaviour you describe is more US
centric?

