Pedestrians have really picked up the pace in recent decades. Or, at least, they have in three of the US’s biggest cities, according to a new study. What this reveals about modern society isn’t quite clear, but it’s probably nothing to do with being fitter.
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), including architect Prof Carlo Ratti, used artificial intelligence (AI) to analyse video footage of people walking in Boston, Philadelphia and two locations in New York, three decades apart.
The earlier footage was collected by sociologist William Whyte between 1978–1980. The later footage, filmed in the same spots, comes from a follow-up study in 2008–2010.
A change of pace
So, what changed? In 1980, pedestrians’ average walking speed was 1.25 metres per second, or 13:20mins/km for those more familiar with the paces recorded on fitness trackers. By 2010, it was 1.41 metres per second or 11:49mins/km.
That’s about 15 per cent quicker.
Anyone walking slower than 0.5 metres per second (33:20mins/km) was classed as a ‘lingerer’ and scrubbed from the walking stats. Lingering was down 14 per cent.
These findings seem to strike a chord. Most would agree that the pace of life has got faster in the last few decades.
We might connect this change to the rapid spread of mobile devices, which didn’t exist in any commercially available form before 1980.
Increasingly, since around 2000, we’ve been taking our social lives, and often work, everywhere we go. Perhaps the constant barrage of messages has led us to subconsciously match the speed of our feet to the speed of our brains.
Or perhaps it’s just left us with less time.
However, even in 2010, mobile phones weren’t quite as pervasive as they are now: about 80 per cent of US adults owned one, but smartphone use was below 40 per cent.
What’s more, the researchers found, by AI detection of the presence of handsets, that phone use in their study was below 10 per cent across all four locations.
This, they say, suggests phones aren’t the only explanation for increased step rates.
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The psychology of speed
Faster walking paces have also been linked to rising wages. But another explanation is growing populations.
As psychologists theorised in the 1970s, crowded streets can be so overwhelming that people may walk faster to exit the sensory overload as quickly as possible.
Meanwhile, lower lingering levels could be at least partly explained by the proliferation of coffee shops, providing new places for people to meet inside instead of out.
The US study covers just three cities. What about elsewhere?
A non-peer-reviewed study by the psychologist Richard Wiseman and the British Council found that people in cities globally walked around 10 per cent faster in 2006 than in the 1990s.
Researchers manually timed pedestrians walking 18m (60ft). Interestingly, in 2006, people in London, New York, Tokyo and Wellington took 12–13 seconds – all under 12mins/km, roughly matching the US results that came four years later.
Does this mean paces are plateauing? If they are, then the MIT crew should soon find out, as they’re currently studying pedestrians in public spaces across Europe.
Of course, we can’t expect to keep on walking faster, or we’ll have to break into a run.
This article is an answer to the question (asked by Bill Simpson, Ickenham) 'Are people walking slower than we used to?'
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