About Walkable Europe

1Why I made this

When I lived in Canada, rental ads showed a number called the Walk Score. I always thought that was genius. For any address, one score told you how walkable the place was, and that score was built from several categories.

Now I'm in Europe, and I haven't found anything similar.

I wanted to type any address, or scroll through a map, and see how walkable a place is and why. I wanted to see the categories behind the number, and maybe even a heat map, which is a map coloured by score. Walkable Europe is that map.

2Credits

This map uses other people's research and data. Here's whose, and what we took from each.

Walk Score, the original idea

Walk Score gives any address in the United States and Canada a score from 0 to 100. Its method page explains how. For each address, it measures walking routes to nearby places in several categories. Places within a 5-minute walk earn full points, places further away earn fewer, and after a 30-minute walk they earn none. It also counts how many people live in the area, how long the blocks are and how often streets meet.

Our Reach score follows the same idea. It counts minutes on foot to daily needs, and a longer walk earns fewer points.

The study of 59 European city centres

The street quality half of our score started with one paper: Alexandros Bartzokas-Tsiompras, Efthimios Bakogiannis and Alexandros Nikitas, Global microscale walkability ratings and rankings: A novel composite indicator for 59 European city centres, Journal of Transport Geography, volume 111, July 2023. It's open access under CC BY 4.0.

The authors rated about 112,000 street segments and crossings in Google Street View images, across 59 city centres in 26 countries. They scored the pavement, the crossings and the street around them. Barcelona's centre came first. Their work showed us that the street itself belongs in a walkability score, and it shaped the second half of ours. The results for each city are open data, published by Alexandros Bartzokas-Tsiompras and Yorgos Photis on Mendeley Data (CC BY 4.0), and we use them in one of our checks.

Ildefons Cerdà's 1859 plan for Barcelona

The map's look comes from Ildefons Cerdà's 1859 plan for the Eixample, the grid of square blocks with the corners cut off in central Barcelona. On his plan, the fill inside each block carries meaning, from fine hatching to dense fill, and single capital letters mark services. Our map borrows that drawing language. When you zoom in to street level, each building is coloured by how easy it is to walk from there: the deeper the blue, the easier the walk. Cerdà's fine hatching is drawn over the colour. The weight of each street line shows its street quality, and letters stand for the eight daily needs.

The data

Every number on the map comes from open data. These are the sources, and the licence each one is shared under.

Required notices: Source : Insee. Source: Eurostat. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Generated using European Union's Copernicus Land Monitoring Service information, modified (tree cover turned into a summer shade estimate).

The map runs on MapLibre and PMTiles. The fonts are Sono and Barlow Semi Condensed, under the SIL Open Font License.

Others mapping walkability in Europe

Other people work on the same question, each with a different method. NearbyIndex measures straight-line access to eight kinds of daily needs. Transform Transport's 15min City Score, Europe Map rates 786 European urban areas from 0 to 100 on what you can reach on foot within 15 minutes. The European walkability index by Nishit Patel and colleagues covers the whole region on a grid of 100 m squares.

3How the score works

We cover the map with six-sided cells 55 m across. Every cell that a street passes through gets a score from 0 to 100, and the score has two parts.

Reach, 60% of the score

From each cell, we measure the walk to eight daily needs: groceries, food and drink, shops, health, school, parks, culture and public transport. We walk on real streets, never in a straight line, at 80 metres a minute. A short walk earns many points. After 20 minutes, a place earns none. The second and third places nearby count too, so a street with three groceries close by scores higher than a street with one.

Street quality, 40% of the score

How pleasant the streets near the cell are to walk on. We measure traffic, noise where a city noise map exists, shade in summer, busy roads nearby, and slope. Summer shade is an estimate. We calculate it from building heights and tree maps, and many buildings have no height on the map. If street quality is under 40, the total score stays at 69 or lower, so a place that is close to everything but sits on a loud, busy road can't reach the top scores.

On the map, you can click any cell to see its score, the walk to each daily need with the nearest named place, and the best and worst streets nearby.

4How we checked it

A walkability score is only useful if it agrees with how people really move. So we compared ours with the census.

In France, in England and Wales, and in Ireland, the census counts how people get to work in each small neighbourhood. In every city, we put the neighbourhoods in order twice, once by the share of people who walk to work and once by our score. Then we measured how well the two orders agree. That's a number from −1 to 1 (statisticians call it a rank correlation). At 1, the two orders are the same. At 0, there's no link at all. We set the pass mark at 0.35 before we saw a single result.

We chose the formula on France. Then we ran England and Wales without changing anything, and the score passed there too. Walking to work is only one kind of walking. That's why the pass mark is 0.35 and not higher. In Paris, where almost everything is a few minutes from everywhere, the match is only 0.17. The 2021 census in England and Wales took place during a COVID lockdown, when many people worked from home.

Two checks didn't pass

City against city. Eurostat publishes the share of people who walk to work for whole cities. Across 71 French cities, our city scores agreed with it at only 0.21, against a pass mark of 0.50. The measure has a flaw of its own. Where a metro carries people to work, few of them walk the whole way, so greater Paris (7.8%) and Lille (7.1%) rank below Clermont-Ferrand (14.5%), a city with no metro. We report the result and don't tune the score to it. The check runs again with each country we add.

Summer shade. The study of 59 city centres also measured how much of each street has trees and cover over it. In the 22 centres we compared, our shade didn't agree with it at all (−0.05, against a pass mark of 0.40). The two measure different things. The audit counts tree cover over the pavement. We calculate the shadows of buildings and trees, and a building with no known height counts as 14 m tall, which puts most central streets in shade. So the map shows summer shade as an estimate and says so. The same study did confirm our busy-road measure, at 0.42, above its pass mark of 0.40.

5Who made it, and the terms

Walkable Europe is a free personal project by Raian Pollock. It isn't commercial.

Map data is © OpenStreetMap contributors and available under the Open Database License (ODbL), which lets anyone use and share the data as long as they credit the source and share changes under the same terms. Every other source keeps its own licence, listed in the credits above.