Category: walking

If you’ve ever used a navigation app to find your way through a city, then its very likely that the app only showed you the fastest route to your destination. Saving time is really important, but what if you could find a route that was fast and improved your mood?

The new updated Walkonomics app for iPhone and Android, can do just that. We’ve added navigation to Walkonomics, that will not only find the fastest walking route, but can also find the most beautiful route to any place in a city. Walkonomics does this by analysing over 1.7 million street trees, thousands of urban parks and over 46,000km of streets and footpaths.

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Hello Toronto!  Our street walkability data is now live for the entire city.  Walkonomics is very happy to announce that we have launched in Toronto, Canada.

Walkonomics has brought it’s unique way of measuring walkability at street-level to the wonderful city of Toronto.  While other walkability apps only measure how many destinations are within walking distance of a particular location, Walkonomics maps and rates each and every street for eight key walkability factors:

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When it comes to walking in the city, a smartphone is now almost as important as a good pair of shoes.  Our phones provide us with pedestrian sat-nav, reviews of the best places to visit and even measure how many calories we’re burning, while we walk.  In fact recent research suggests that our phones are encouraging us to walk further in the city and explore more places.

Now a new mobile app from Walkonomics provides an essential tool for the walkable lifestyle.  The Walkonomics app enables people to check the walkability of the street they’re standing in, as well as discover new walkable streets in other areas and add their own reviews.  The free app, which is available for Android devices, uses over 600,000 street ratings from Walkonomics.com, covering every street in San Francisco, New York and England.  But unlike other walkability apps, which only measure how many destinations are within walking distance, the Walkonomics app provides 5-star ratings for 8 different categories of pedestrian-friendliness:

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The western world is getting fatter.  It’s hard to ignore the spiralling rates of obesity in developed countries such as the UK and US, where more than one in four of us is now clinically obese.  But perhaps even more alarming is the speed at which our children are becoming dangerously fat.  More than one-third of children in the UK are now either obese or overweight and in the US the rate of childhood obesity has more than tripled in the last 30 years.  Being an obese child doesn’t just mean you might get picked on at school, it also significantly increases your likelihood of developing heart disease, diabetes and having a stroke when you are older.

There is an ongoing discussion among academics as to the exact causes of this very real obesity crisis.  This includes the usual argument of how much nature versus nurture creates childhood obesity.  Now a new study has shown that living in a walkable neighbourhood has an important effect on whether a child is obese or not. 

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If you’ve ever been in an East African city during rush hour, then you’ll know that African cities are walking cities. In the rapidly urbanising capitals of Africa, walking is by far and away the most popular form of transport. For instance over 60% of trips in Addis Ababa are made on foot, while just 9% of trips are made in a car and in Nairobi over 45% of people walk. These are the kind of walking statistics that developed cities can only dream of: London struggles to get 20% of people to walk and in New York its between 10-20%.

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There’s been plenty of research into how walkable streets and neighbourhoods get more people walking. However what we’re less sure about is: Who are the people that choose to walk more?

In an attempt to answer this question, Transport for London have released new research with some interesting findings.  By combining a large travel survey with Londoners demographic data, the study attempted to identify which types of people walk more as part of their everyday lifestyle.

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