Why 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 was looking at apartments and I thought maybe it would be cool to put an address and get that back, so that was kind of the origin story. Plus, I've always been a fan of maps and data visualizations, so that also fit well.
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. Walkably is that map.
Whose work this map stands on
This map uses other people's research and data. Here is whose, and what I took from each.
Walk Score is the original idea. It gives any address in the United States and Canada a score from 0 to 100, and 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. My Reach score follows a similar idea, with a method I developed further. It counts minutes on foot to daily needs, and a longer walk earns fewer points.
The street quality half of my score started with one paper. Alexandros Bartzokas-Tsiompras, Efthimios Bakogiannis and Alexandros Nikitas wrote Global microscale walkability ratings and rankings, a novel composite indicator for 59 European city centres, in the Journal of Transport Geography, volume 111, July 2023. It is 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 me that the street itself belongs in a walkability score, and it shaped the second half of mine. The results for each city are open data, published by Alexandros Bartzokas-Tsiompras and Yorgos Photis on Mendeley Data under CC BY 4.0, and I use them in one of my checks.
Last month, September 2026, I went to an exhibition at the Disseny Hub Barcelona called Seny i rauxa, an account of Catalan architecture. It showed about four hundred works since 1875, sketches, drawings, plans, models and photographs. That visit led me to use an architect's drawing as the look of Walkably. The look comes from Ildefons Cerdà's 1859 plan for the Eixample, the grid of square blocks with cut-off corners in central Barcelona. On his plan, the fill inside each block carries meaning, and single capital letters mark services. My map borrows that drawing language. At street level, each building is shaded grey by how easy it is to walk from there. Darker grey means an easier walk. Cerdà's fine hatching sits over the grey, street line weight shows street quality, and letters stand for the eight daily needs.
Every number on the map is built from public sources. OpenStreetMap gives the streets, paths and places. The Ajuntament de Barcelona noise map gives street noise in Barcelona. Mapterhorn, built from national terrain models and the Copernicus world terrain model, gives the slope. The European Commission's Joint Research Centre building height map (GHS-BUILT-H R2023A) gives building heights where the map has none. The Copernicus Land Monitoring Service tree cover map gives the summer shade. OpenFreeMap draws the background map, and Photon by Komoot runs the address search. The licences and the required notices are on the About page of walkably.org.
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. Strado scores what you can reach on foot in a few minutes, across 22 kinds of places, for cities in Europe.
How the score works
I 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 is 60% of the score. From each cell, I measure the walk to eight daily needs. These are groceries, food and drink, shops, health, school, parks, culture and public transport. The walk follows real streets, never a straight line, at 80 metres a minute. The shorter the walk, the more points it earns. 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 is 40% of the score. It measures how pleasant the streets near the cell are to walk on. That means traffic, noise where a city noise map exists, shade in summer, busy roads nearby, and slope. Summer shade is an estimate. I calculate it from building heights and tree maps. Where a building has no height on the map, I take the average height of buildings in that spot from the EU's building height 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 weakest streets nearby. When there are several places of one kind close by, it also says how many are within 5 or 10 minutes. Every city of about 100,000 people or more also has its own page, in its own language and in English.
Next to each walk, the map shows a word, such as "Better than most". I compare the walk with every place in Europe where people live, and a place with more buildings counts more. So the same minutes get the same word in Zurich, in Paris or in a village. For groceries, a walk of 4.4 minutes or less is "Much better than most". A walk of more than 11.5 minutes is "Worse than most". If there is nothing within 20 minutes, the map says so. The ten cells next to the word compare the walk with the places you see on the map, so they change when you move or zoom it.
A street I know
Before I had data, my guess was simple. "Enric Granados is super walkable, or Consell de Cent. It's also mostly car-free, low noise, I would imagine."
The map mostly agrees. Carrer d'Enric Granados at its midpoint scores 87 of 100, better than 99% of places in Spain. The map calls it a quiet residential street, at about 59 decibels, quiet for central Barcelona. Seven of the eight daily needs are within about two minutes on foot, and the nearest park about three. It is car-free at its southern end, as I guessed, but cars still use the midpoint. Carrer del Consell de Cent, in its green-axis stretch, also scores 87, as a shared street with cars at walking pace. All eight daily needs sit within about two minutes. Its noise is about 63 decibels, moderate rather than low, and it is the shadier of the two.
I was right about walkability, and right about noise on one street only.
How I checked it
A walkability score is only useful if it agrees with how people really move. So I compared mine 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, I put the neighbourhoods in order twice, once by the share of people who walk to work and once by my score. Then I measured how well the two orders agree. That is a number from −1 to 1, which statisticians call a rank correlation. At 1, the two orders are the same. At 0, there is no link at all. I set the pass mark at 0.35 before I saw a single result.
I chose the formula on France. Then I ran England and Wales without changing anything, and the score passed there too, as it did in Ireland. Walking to work is only one kind of walking. That is 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 0.18. The 2021 census in England and Wales took place during a COVID lockdown, when many people worked from home.
Checks that didn't pass.
City against city. Eurostat publishes the share of people who walk to work for whole cities. Across 195 cities in the 20 countries on the map, my city scores don't agree with it at all (-0.04, 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. So before I ran the check again, I wrote down a second version with the same pass mark, the share of people who walk or take public transport to work. It agrees much better, at 0.43, but it's still under 0.50. I report both results and don't tune the score to them.
Summer shade. The study of 59 city centres also measured how much of each street has trees over it. In the 43 centres I compared, my shade doesn't agree with it (-0.18, against a pass mark of 0.40). The audit counts trees only, while I also count the shadows of buildings. So before the next run, I wrote down a second check, my shade from trees alone. It agrees better, at 0.27, but it's still under 0.40. The two also count in different ways. The audit counts a whole street as shaded when trees cover more than a quarter of it. I count only the part of the street that is in shadow. In central Barcelona, the audit finds 95% and my trees alone give 26%. So the map shows summer shade as an estimate and says so. The same study did confirm my busy-road measure, at 0.56 across the same 43 centres, above its pass mark of 0.40.
Who made it, and how to reach me
Walkably is made by me, Raian Pollock. It is free for anyone to use on the site. To use the scores in a product, an app or research, write to [email protected]. Does the map get a street wrong? Tell me at [email protected]. Please add the address, or a link to the place on the map.