The more walkable your city is, the more likely it is that you might find it easier to stay physically active. A new U.S.-based study found that moving from a less walkable city to a more walkable city resulted in people walking an extra 1,100 steps each day.
“While increasing the walkability of all cities to the level of New York City is probably not possible, earlier research has shown promising connections between implemented changes to the built environment, walkability, and physical activity. The results of our analysis will provide researchers and policy-makers with the information to estimate the effects of targeted increases in walkability on physical activity and weigh the cost-effectiveness of changes to the built environment against other public health interventions,” the researchers wrote in their study.
“This countrywide natural experiment presents prospective evidence of built environments affecting physical activity across 7,447 relocations among 1,609 US cities over a 3-year timespan. It reveals the direct behavioural impacts of differing built environments on the physical activity levels of individuals and demonstrates the utility of such massive, digitally enabled, real-world datasets for evidence-based policy. Our findings suggest that designing built environments to be more activity-friendly could have significant effects on the physical activity of large populations, and serve as a powerful complement to interventions that focus on changing behaviour at the individual level,” the researchers added.
The team analyzed the data of 5,424 people who used an app that tracked their physical activity levels before and after relocating to a new city over a period of three years. They observed that people who moved to New York City from a less walkable city had managed to increase their daily average of 5,600 steps to 7,000. “Participants relocating in the opposite direction, that is, from New York City to other less walkable US cities, exhibited an inverted, symmetric effect of decreasing their physical activity by 1,400 steps, going from 7,000 to 5,600 average daily steps,” the authors noted.
“ If participants who moved were motivated to increase their physical activity after moving, we should have observed this increase also for relocations to environments of similar walkability, but we did not observe any difference. If participants who moved relocated to higher-walkability locations specifically for this quality, a form of residential self-selection, we should have observed higher physical activity increases relative to physical activity decreases when relocating to a lower-physical-activity location. Instead, we observed point symmetric changes,” they further explained. “In addition, we observe that these increases are sustained over 3 months after moving. Furthermore, we find similar, consistent effects of walkability increases and decreases between cities in similar climates (for example, Ellicott City, MD to New York, NY), and more generally across relocations during all seasons, and after relocating to cities of higher, similar, and lower median household income. In addition, census data suggest that between 77% and 98% of participants who move do not move for walkability reasons, but instead for family, job, and housing-related reasons.”
“Overall, these results suggest that physical activity levels are directly influenced by the built environment and not simply a product of personal preferences or other types of selection effects,” the researchers concluded. Their study was published in the journal Nature on August 13, 2025.
