Urban design affects walking levels

September 16, 2025

Urban design affects walking levels

At a Glance

A large study using smartphone data found that moving to different communities can affect how much you walk.
The results suggest that the design of a community can play a role in levels of physical activity.

Group of people exercise-walking in a park.

By analyzing data from thousands of smartphones, researchers found that moving to more walkable cities is linked to increased physical activity.

Bignai / Shutterstock

Everyone knows that physical activity is good for you. But many Americans don’t get the recommended amounts. Lack of physical activity increases the risk of many serious conditions, like heart disease, diabetes, and cancer.

Walking is a fairly easy and common way to get physical activity. Research has found that higher step counts can bring meaningful health benefits. While community design has the potential to affect levels of walking, studies in this area have had mixed results.

A research team led by Dr. Tim Althoff at the University of Washington designed a study to better understand the relationship between daily steps and the walkability of a community. They analyzed data from more than 2 million smartphones to measure changes in daily step counts after people moved to different locations within the U.S. Their study appeared in Nature on August 13, 2025.

The researchers evaluated minute-by-minute step recordings from users of the Azumio Argus smartphone app between March 2013 and February 2016. They identified more than 5,400 people who relocated within the U.S. at least once during that time. They then compared daily step counts for up to 90 days before and after individuals relocated.

To determine how walkable a location was, the researchers used walkability scores. These are based on measures of friendliness to pedestrians, such as city block length and distance to amenities like stores, schools, and parks.

The team found that walkability scores were linked with physical activity. For example, moving from a city in the 25^th percentile to one in the 75^th percentile led to an increase in roughly 1,100 steps per day.

Higher walkability was associated with significantly more daily steps across age, gender, body mass index (BMI), and the starting level of activity. The only subgroup that did not have a significant difference in daily steps upon relocation was women over 50 years old.

Using minute-by-minute step data, the researchers found that the increased steps after moving to a more walkable environment were generally fast-paced, corresponding to brisk walks. These fall in the category of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity, which has been linked to improved health outcomes.

Other factors, such as climate and transit, affect walkability as well. However, the findings strongly suggest that urban design affects physical activity levels.

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

—by Karen Olsen, Ph.D.

References

. Althoff T, Ivanovic B, King AC, Hicks JL, Delp SL, Leskovec J. Nature 2025 Aug 13. doi: 10.1038/s41586-025-09321-3. Online ahead of print. PMID: 40804514.

Funding

NIH’s National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB), Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), and National Institute on Aging (NIA); National Science Foundation (NSF); Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance.

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