Vital City | Tracking How New Yorkers Walk to Better Plan Streets and Safety

Vital City | Tracking How New Yorkers Walk to Better Plan Streets and Safety
Explore
Commentary
Policy
Charts & Data Stories
Crime Data Explorer
Podcast
Our Team
Contributors
Donate
Events
Shop
The Journal
Crime: Looking Back at 2025, and Ahead to 2026
Mamdani, the Morning After
400 Million Guns (or More)
Housing, Housing, Housing
Zohran and Andrew and Eric, Oh My!
All Issues
Mathias Wasik
To Prioritize Pedestrians, We Need to Walk the Walk
City Planning
Andres Sevtsuk
Apr. 16 2026
Share
Share
Share
Get the best ideas, every week.
News, data and policy, straight to your inbox
Behind a major new effort to track pedestrian flows in New York
There is an old saying in urban planning: What gets counted, counts. By that logic, what remains uncounted risks being overlooked.
Stand at a busy street corner in New York — say, somewhere between Midtown’s 5 p.m. hustle-bustle and a quieter outer-borough avenue — and watch closely. Some move quickly, some slowly; some with purpose, while others meander or sit down. What first appears as a whirlwind of pedestrian flux, soon appears to have structure. People are not moving randomly. They are tracing paths: from subway exits to office towers, from homes to schools, from shops to parks. Together, they form a system. In fact, one of the most fundamental systems in the city — what Jane Jacobs liked to call the “sidewalk ballet,” Jan Gehl the “life between buildings” and Alison and Peter Smithson “the charged void.”
For more than a century, urban planning has devoted extraordinary attention to the movement of vehicles. We know how many cars pass through every intersection, how car traffic ebbs and flows over the course of a day, how congestion propagates across networks. These measurements are not merely descriptive; they are constitutive. They determine funding formulas, infrastructure priorities, street-design specs and ultimately the physical shape of cities.
Pedestrian movement, by contrast, has remained largely in the shadows. Walking is not only the most universal form of mobility — accessible to children, to older adults, to those who cannot afford to drive — but, in cities like New York, it is also the most common. More trips are made on foot than by car. And yet pedestrian activity is the least systematically measured and understood mode of travel. While the New York City’s Department of Transportation is one of the very few city agencies in the world that actually has a number of staff dedicated just to pedestrian mobility, cities generally do not know how many people walk on each given street, nor maintain reliable maps of the sidewalks where they can walk.
In
recent work with colleagues at MIT
, we sought to make pedestrian movement visible at the scale of the entire city. This required beginning with a problem that is at once mundane and revealing: assembling a coherent map of New York’s pedestrian network. Sidewalks, crosswalks and footpaths, all connected into a routable network — the basic infrastructure of urban life on foot.
Using this network, we developed a model to estimate how pedestrians travel in the city during peak travel hours — in the morning, during the midday and after work — between homes, jobs, transit stations, schools, parks and amenities. Unlike traditional transportation models, which operate at the level of large zones, this approach works at the scale of individual buildings and street segments. It allows us to ask, with some precision, not just how many people are walking in a neighborhood, but where, exactly, they are walking. How much foot-traffic does 32
nd
Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues in Manhattan have on weekdays between 5-6 p.m.? Around 3,700 people per hour. What about Bushwick Ave between Linden St and Gates Ave? Around 190 people per hour. We calibrated the model with roughly a thousand observed pedestrian counts that the DOT had commissioned at different streets and intersections throughout the city.
When one begins to measure pedestrian movement systematically, the city’s dynamism takes on a different clarity, revealing an underlying structure. Morning peaks are shaped by the gravitational pull of jobs and transit stations; midday flows reflect the rhythms of errands and social life; evenings blend the residuals of work with the anticipations of leisure and social gatherings. These patterns are not incidental. They are the temporal signature of interactions between individuals’ activity and travel choices and the built environment that frames and constrains these choices.
Modeling and visualizing foot traffic in a city has a number of practical implications that are increasingly difficult to ignore. Cities today face a set of intertwined challenges: reducing carbon emissions, accommodating growth and ensuring safety and equity in development. In each of these domains, pedestrian movement plays a central role.
Consider the question of decarbonization. Ambitious climate targets hinge, in no small part, on shifting trips away from automobiles toward more sustainable modes (the transport sector is the largest contributor to CO2 emissions in the U.S., roughly 30%, largely due to personal cars). A shift to more walking and public transit use is essential to reducing this share. But such shifts do not occur by convincing people to change their behavior, against their self-interests or needs. People choose to walk or to use public transit when such modes offer the most convenient, affordable or time-efficient ways of getting to places. To ensure that a larger share of the urban population naturally chooses sustainable travel options in the future, we need to ensure that the built environment develops in a direction that makes sustainable travel accessible and logical for more people. This takes time, but the good news is that there are a number of things that planners and city governments can actually do to nudge this shift — configure land use patterns that contain various daily necessities in close proximity, incentivize denser urban developments, prioritize pedestrian and cycling attributes in streets renovations and improve transit service quality.
A model of pedestrian movement allows us to examine how the built environment influences sustainable travel behavior. It offers a way to anticipate how changes in land use or infrastructure might alter walking patterns, and by extension, mode choice. Without such tools, planning for mode shift risks relying more on aspiration than on evidence.
At a finer scale, the implications are equally significant. Because the model operates at the level of individual buildings and street segments, it can connect everyday planning decisions to broader system-wide outcomes. A new residential development, a rezoning action, a shift in retail geography — each of these interventions generates and redistributes pedestrian trips. Taken together, they shape the mode-share profile of the city.
This connection between the granular and the global is often missing in urban policy. Climate goals are articulated at the scale of cities or regions, while the decisions that influence them are made incrementally, parcel by parcel. Bridging that divide requires tools that can trace the cumulative effects of local actions. Pedestrian models offer one such bridge.
They also introduce a more nuanced understanding of pedestrian well-being and safety. Much of the current discourse around pedestrian safety relies on counts of crashes or injuries. While important, these measures can be misleading if considered in isolation. A location with a high number of crashes, like Times Square, may simply reflect a high volume of pedestrians. Another location, with fewer incidents but far fewer pedestrians, may present a greater risk per pedestrian. A granular understanding of foot traffic provides a measure of exposure — a denominator against which risk can be assessed. When viewed through this lens, the geography of risk shifts. Some of the most dangerous intersections, in relative terms, are not the most crowded ones in Manhattan, but locations in other boroughs where pedestrian volumes are lower and risks per person are higher.
This has implications not only for safety, but for equity too. It suggests that the distribution of risk — and by extension, the allocation of resources to address it — may be misaligned if we focus solely on aggregate crash counts. Improving walking infrastructure in outer boroughs that have historically received far less investment and where kids have to walk to school over dangerous intersections is no less important than maintaining the sidewalks of Times Square.
Underlying all of this is a more fundamental point: measurement is not neutral. It directs attention, frames problems and shapes solutions. For decades, the tools of urban analysis have been finely tuned to capture vehicular movement. They have enabled remarkable advances in transportation planning, but they have also reinforced a particular way of seeing the city — one in which the movement of cars is central, and the movement of people on foot is peripheral. Rebalancing that perspective requires not only new models, but a broader shift in what we consider worthy of measurement.
Walking, after all, is not a niche activity. It is the connective tissue of urban life. It links transit to destinations, homes to neighborhoods, individuals to one another. It is also the most equitable mode of transportation we have.
To take it seriously — to measure it with the same rigor we have long applied to driving — is to begin to see cities more clearly. And perhaps, in doing so, to design them more wisely.
Andres Sevtsuk
is an associate professor of urban science and planning at MIT, where he leads the City Design and Development program group and directs the City Form Lab.
Up Next
Homelessness
Why It Takes Four New Housing Units to Get One Person Off the Street
Sherry Glied
Apr. 16 2026
Homelessness
Homeless Encampments, Expenditures and the Evidence We Keep Ignoring
Amie Pospisil
Apr. 16 2026
Just Fix It
Mamdani’s First 100 Days: A Scorecard
Vital City
Apr. 14 2026
Great! You’ve successfully signed up.
Welcome back! You've successfully signed in.
You've successfully subscribed to Vital City.
Your link has expired.
Success! Check your email for magic link to sign-in.
Success! Your billing info has been updated.
Your billing was not updated.