Walk/Don’t-Walk – In Which States Do Citizens Stroll The Most?

Data from transportation analytics company StreetLight shows that residents of the District of Columbia and the states of New York and New Jersey walked the most in 2022, with an average of 42, 38 and 32 walking trips per day per 100 people in 2022.

The majority of the remaining states in the top 10 like California, Nevada, Utah or Massachusetts are either small or highly urbanized according to an analysis by Iowa State University based on 2010 data.

Additionally, Statista’s Florian Zandt reports that the StreetLight study, which uses proprietary movement data analyzed with the help of machine learning, also shows that between 2019 and 2022, walking trips declined by 36 percent on a national level.

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Zooming in on the year-over-year change in specific states, only four states saw an increase in walking activity in 2022 compared to 2021. The District of Columbia, which was evaluated as a state by StreetLight, again led this ranking with a 32 percent rise in average annual daily walking trips, followed by Vermont, California and New York.

Possible reasons given by the study for the overall decrease in walking trips over the analyzed period are the rise of remote work due to the restrictions put in place during the coronavirus pandemic and “empty downtowns”. The former will likely play a less important role from 2023 onward due to many major companies implementing return-to-office policies, especially in the tech sector. Amazon, for example, will mandate five office days per week for office workers not covered by a “Remote Work Exception” starting January 2025, according to an official company memo by CEO Andy Jassy.

Even with selected states exhibiting a high ratio of average daily walking trips, transportation by foot is still the exception rather than the norm in the United States. According to the most recent National Household Travel Survey conducted in 2022, walking only made up seven percent of all person trips. Three quarters of all person trips, which is a journey by one person from one address to another, were conducted either by car, van or SUV.