What Your Walking Speed Says About You

When Steve Jobs helped to design Pixar’s offices, employee performance was his goal. Called the pulse of the building, public spaces were supposed to lure people out of their offices. Initially mandating just one set of bathrooms off the central atrium, he wanted everyone to have the same destination. (In the end though, Jobs was persuaded by his CTO to have second floor restrooms.) Seemingly haphazard, restroom traffic flow was a strategy for enhancing labor productivity through random meetings. It was just one of many ways that Steve Jobs used architecture to optimize creativity.

From the Steve Jobs Building at Pixar:

Also concerned with public spaces, researchers recently observed pedestrian activity in three cities. Looking at four neighborhoods in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, they compared walking speeds, lingering behavior, and group formation in 1980 and 2010. Like Jobs, they concluded that public spaces can make a difference.

Urban Walking Speeds

In their November 2024 paper, 8 scholars began by saying that walking meant moving .5 meters a second or faster. Slower for at least 5 seconds, and you are a lingerer. Next, with AI images in the same places as a classic 1980 study, they did their comparisons. Because of privacy concerns, the AI images had to be older.

As you might expect, we are walking faster. Up by 15%, walking speed accelerated:

Meanwhile, lingering was down by 14%. (The New York locations were Bryant Park and the Metropolitan Museum of Art; in Philadelphia, they looked at Chestnut Street’s pedestrians and for Boston, it was Downtown Crossing):

Although many of us in 2010, like 1980, were walking alone, there was less group formation:

The numbers say we are using our public space less for human interaction and more as a way to get somewhere.

Our Bottom Line: Tradeoffs

In 3 U.S. cities

We can ask what has happened to individuals and to our urban spaces during the past 30 years. The answers could lay in the sacrifices that walking times require. Walking faster, each of us could be demonstrating how we value time. Using less time walking, perhaps, we believe we should be at work earning more of a wage, or at home with family and friends. As for the public space tradeoffs, the four neighborhoods became less of a gathering place and more of a thoroughfare to pass through.

At this point we can ask about incentives. For this question, researchers wondered if single pedestrians were in fact socializing but it was on their cell phones. They also suggested that fewer cars and less noise could make urban streets more friendly to lingerers. Alternatively, “a third space” like coffee shops could be the urban space of choice for lingering now.

Today’s study reminded me of the time urgency in 31 countries that econlife looked at approximately a decade ago.

In 31 countries

Wondering about people’s “time urgency” social psychologist Robert Levine observed how fast people walked 60 feet during rush hour on a clear day. Curious about how long it took a clerk to sell a stamp, he timed a post office transaction. Also, he checked to see if their bank clocks said the same time. Levine hypothesized that a faster paced environment was the byproduct of a vital economy.

Summarizing, we can say that he looked at people’s walking pace, their work pace, and their time attitude. His results, shown in the table (below) from The Geography of Time (1997), display each country’s time urgency rank:

Quoting anthropologist Allen Johnson, Levine said that as we industrialize, we move from “time surplus” to “time affluence” to “time famine.” Once we think we have a time shortage, as with any shortfall, its marginal utility rises, and we tolerate less waste. Then, the opportunity cost of delay—what we sacrifice—has become much more expensive.

Like Pixar, public spaces can bring us together, even when we have time famine.

My sources and more: Thanks to Bloomberg City Lab for reminding me it was time to return to the significance of our walking speed. In addition to following their link to this  NBER working paper, I returned to a past econlife post. Also, here and here, we learned more about Pixar design.

(Unless otherwise indicated, all graphics are from NBER working paper 33185, and several of today’s sentences were in a past econlife post.)