Walking in the City

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I recently moved to one of the biggest cities in the world, New York City. As a result, I'm walking WAY more.

I can go anywhere I need to by walking or some combination of walking and public transit. My grad school is 1,301 steps plus a 25-minute subway ride from my place in the Lower East Side. Trader Joe's – my favorite grocery store – is 431 steps from my kitchen. The East Village – where I go out with friends on the weekend – is 1,508 steps away. Arthur's Tavern, a bar with excellent jazz music in the West Village, is 2,801 steps away from my front door. And if I wanted to get out of town, New York's JFK airport is 646 steps plus a 50-minute subway ride from my apartment. Convenient but not easy. I'm the one making the engine run.

My life was a little different when I lived on the West Coast in San Luis Obispo, California. Instead of walking to the store, work, or downtown, I'd drive. As a result, I took fewer steps per day than I do now. In fact, I took 37% fewer steps. In December 2022, in SLO, I averaged 8,416.5 steps per day. Since moving to NYC, I've averaged 13,536.5 steps daily – a 37% increase! Over a year, that's a lot. If everyone took 37% more steps, we'd all be healthier.

Even though I'm walking more, New York City isn't even close to the most walkable cities worldwide. According to this article, Florence, Venice, Riga, Athens, and Hamburg have the highest walkability scores globally. Out of the fifty cities listed, twenty-eight of them are European. Sadly, only nine US cities made the list, which makes sense based on this walkability index (shown below). The areas in green are considered "walkable." And as you can see from the image, there isn't a lot of green.

In Europe, cities were designed and built long before mass automobile ownership. This meant they needed to be walkable and well-connected by public transit. People enjoy living in these cities because of their character and personality. And they get their character from how walkable they are. Oddly, people in the United States don't say the same thing about Los Angeles and Dallas – weird, right?

These cities were built long after their European counterparts and with much more efficiency, which meant walkability wasn't a big concern during the design phase. It was more important there were enough roads for all the cars. This was great for capitalism but less great for commuters. Instead of spending 20 minutes on the train commuting to work as most Europeans do, residents of major American cities now spend hours every day commuting by car. And because there are a lot of cars, there's also a lot of traffic. The average LA driver sits in traffic for one-hundred HOURS per year. Not moving, just sitting. That's the definition of misery if you ask me.

Speaking of LA, it's my least favorite city by a long shot. It's filled with Dodger fans (no offense), and it takes two hours to travel three miles by car. It's absurd. Plus, if you want to hang out with your friends or enjoy a night out, it requires driving somewhere, which – as we know – means sitting in more traffic. When I walk outside my apartment in NYC, there are 50+ restaurants and bars within a few blocks. That doesn't exist in LA.

In NYC, you have people stacked on top of each other. In LA, you have people lined up for miles next to each other. Maybe one isn't better than the other, but their disparity highlights a lesson in urban economics: the larger your streets, the smaller your sidewalks. In LA, the roads are wide, and the highways wider, and as a result, the sidewalks are almost non-existent. But in NYC, the streets are proportional to the sidewalks, and the highways run outside and around the city. And like NYC, the most walkable cities around the globe share this reality: their streets don't consume their sidewalks. While living in Europe last year, I noticed that cities like Valencia, Bellagio, Bilbao, Budapest, Interlaken, and Milan all had massive sidewalks. This meant everyone walked. And if they weren't walking, they were using public transit. Either way, people in these cities spend more time walking and moving than the LA folks sitting in traffic.

I don't think it's a coincidence that Europeans live longer than Americans. They're encouraged to move. The sidewalks are massive, and the streets are small. Not to mention they eat less junk. It seems so simple in theory: if you make cities more walkable, people will walk more and, thereby, be healthier. But the worst part is the theory checks out. We have data from around the world that shows people move more when their environment nudges them to do so. I can't redesign LA or any other major US city right now, but I can write this article. So that'll do.

Anyway, it's 1:16 am, and I just finished writing. My stomach is nudging me to get some food. So I'm going to walk around the corner, get a snack from the 24/7 deli, say what up to my friend working the register, and go to bed. Bet you can't do that in LA.

Keep crushing.

Cheers,

Noah Cracknell

P.S. I'd love to hear from you, what's one thing you have going on in your life that excites you? Reply directly to this email and let me know.

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