Not So Fast, New York

The price we pay for walking quicker than ever.

This article is narrated by its author - click on the voiceover at the top.

Yesterday, I got stuck in traffic. I was walking briskly along the pavement (that’s the British word for “sidewalk”) and I had to stumble to a halt because there were two teenagers in front of me, covering the whole path, and walking incredibly slowly because they were on their phones.

Maybe this is where I should tear off on a rant about young people, but that’d be hypocritical - because of my job I’m glued to my phone most of the time, and I’m always getting in the way of other people because something happens like: OMG, the legendary Jane Espenson who wrote episodes of Firefly and Battlestar Galactica and Foundation has just shared something I wrote on Bluesky, that’s it, I’ve finally made it as a writer, and I’m so thrilled I’m going to name all the subheadings in my next newsletter after TV show episodes she’s written - and suddenly, there’s a polite cough behind me, and I realise I’m at the front of a queue of my own making and I’m the idiot that everyone is exasperated with.

I hate doing this. And I’m always doing this.

But yesterday, with these teenagers blocking my way, my options were many. I could stride out onto the road and be swept under the wheels of the afternoon bus to Kilmarnock. I could pretend that I always meant to stop anyway, and lean against a lamp post with an air of being a great literary observer of the human condition, smoking an imaginary pipe like a Scottish version of Substack’s Daniel Piper. I could lunge forward and throw them under the bus to Kilmarnock. I could politely - but firmly - ask them to get out the way.

Or I could lean into my natural cowardice, and slow down to match their snail’s pace.

It’s not important which option I chose. There’s no need to dwell on it, and I’m sure that you would have done exactly the same as I did, because deep down, aren’t we all cowards? Moving on.

What all this got me thinking about was a throwaway line I read in Alexandra Horowitz’s On Looking about the walking pace of pedestrians, and how it varies from place to place.

Lovers Walk

(Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 3, Episode 8)

It seems the first big study into urban walking speed was by Marc and Helen Bornstein in 1976 (here) which found a positive correlation between local population size and walking speed in 15 cities and towns in six countries across Europe, Asia and North America.

Its suggestion was that people walk slower in a tiny Scottish seaside town like the one I live in, and absolute blaze along in a big city like Alexandra Horowitz’s New York. That was just one study, but these findings have been replicated in many other studies since, collecting data from different towns and cities. It certainly seems like it’s a thing.

The latest was run by MIT and took place in cities in North America, and it’s currently being expanded upon in Europe this year - and it found something fascinating and maybe a bit worrying. It appears we’re all speeding up.

MIT’s 2025 study looked at pedestrians in four public space in three American cities: Boston, Philadelphia and New York, using timelapse video footage filmed by urbanist William H Whyte in 1980, and Keith Hampton in 2010. Then the researchers used AI modelling to map individual pedestrians to find their walking speed and trajectory, from which they could derive an average for each location.

What they found across three decades was an increase in median walking speed of about 15% in every location.

Another study by Richard Wiseman and the British Council in 2006 looked at 35 city centres around the world, finding Singapore had the most hot-footed walkers - and it found an median increase of around 10% since the 1990s.

Escape Velocity

(Battlestar Galactica, Season 4, Episode 4)

Now, these are all looking at cities, where younger people tend to go when they want to speed something up in their lives: job opportunities, income, romantic prospects, their sheer pace of life.

Cities accelerate humans in so many ways, so it’s not hard to see why they’d walk faster as well. In the ‘70s the Bornsteins figured it was due to how crowded the streets were - when we’re feeling hemmed in, we speed up to escape - or the presence of so many people overstimulates us, a kind of visual caffeine mixed with airborne pheremones and other things that tend to hype us up.

I’ve felt something like this myself! In 2019 I was in New York for a few days, and took a long walk down to Battery Park - and I don’t think I’ve ever walked faster in my life, it was like my blood was fizzing, and I could really feel it in my legs the next day.

Cities are also more expensive, which potentially means everyone’s time is worth more - so the quicker you get from A to B, the more money you’d save. So it makes sense that city-dwellers would be prone to dawdling less.

But the recent MIT study found this was changing too. The proportion of people lingering in all four locations - where “lingering” means “moving at less than half a metre per second” - had fallen from 43% to 26%. Also, and no doubt relatedly, in 1980, one in twenty people interacted with other people in the space around them. In 2010, it was one in fifty.

What’s that going to be like now, with the lingering trauma of a pandemic still simmering away inside us? What about, you know, the state of everything right now?

All this means that urban designers have a challenge on their hands - that’s partly what urban design is for, to solve emerging problems like this by bringing people together in better ways.

A Golden Crown

(Game of Thrones, Season 1, Episode 6)

I really do think all this is a problem. In this season of Everything Is Amazing, I’m looking at the ways getting outdoors could be good for us, and my working bias I’m trying to interrogate here is “yes, getting outdoors more often is a desirable thing.”

There are lots of people writing on this topic with far more expertise and eloquence than I ever could - I’ll just point you towards social ecologist Kate Howlett here, also writing on Substack - but I get how this stuff can feel a bit more abstract if you live in a big city, especially on a really hot day when the smells are particularly ripe, or when the traffic is particularly deafening.

I can easily imagine that what you might want to do is to leave one type of Indoors and cross the city as fast as possible to reach the climate-controlled safety of another Indoors - which means, if you have to walk, you’re trying to be efficient, weaving your way around obstacles, checking your phone’s map if you need it, no time to waste because time is money and both are in short supply, so you’re walking faster and faster, fixated on your destination, the sweat dripping, your calves aching, until, until you can finally….

Stop.

And that’s when you realise you have no memory of the journey you’ve just taken. We make memories by paying attention, and you were paying none of it.

Sometimes that’s exactly what you want. Just to get it over with. But maybe it means that next time you’re considering going for a walk like that just for fun, you’ll have nothing pleasant to remember about the previous one you took, nothing to help coax you out again.

It was “boring”. There was “nothing to see”.

In a way, you were barely there at all.

A.K.A. Hellcat

(Jessica Jones, Season 3, Episode 11)

In the summer of 2021, I was out for a swim at my local beach here in western Scotland. The water temperature was almost bearable, the wind was just under gale force - in other words, perfect conditions for swimming in Scotland, or at least, as good as you’re ever going to get.

I saw two people laid on surfboards, kicking lazily along, and since this was 2021 and recent lockdowns meant I was feeling a bit starved of chance encounters with strangers, I decided to splash my way over and say hello.

Then, a few miles away, the coast exploded.

Ka-BANG!!!

We were all a bit startled. This bit of coastline doesn’t tend to explode very often - if it did, well, I probably wouldn’t live here.

We all just looked at each other in silence, in that moment of wonderful confusion when the normal world does something you never thought it could.

Then we were all talking. What the hell was that? Can you see smoke? Yes, I see it too. Wait, it was probably what?

As a girl on one of the surfboards explained, there used to be a dynamite manufacturing plant just to the north (built by one Alfred Nobel, he of the famous Prizes) - and for a time it was the largest explosives factory in the world. It’s been closed for a while now, but it seems someone that day was disposing of some unwanted bang-sticks and just forgot to warn everyone. (Alas, I’ve never been able to find anything about it in the local news.)

But what it did for us was give us a conversation to have - the kind it’s difficult to engineer without some literally awesome external event you can use as an excuse to break the ice with a stranger.

(Difficult, but not impossible, as I argued here.)

This was only possible because we were lingering. The sea was our temporary destination, and we were just hanging around in it, enjoying how it made us feel and, it turned out, waiting for a stick of dynamite to bring us together for a quick chat.

One possible explanation for the decline in lingering-time is the rise of coffee shops - they’ve been around for centuries alongside tea-rooms and cafés here in the UK, but they’ve exploded in popularity over the last few decades - the coffee shop sector has now become a £6 billion

industry. And what’s a coffee shop? It’s a formalised lingering place, where it’s not weird to sit sipping your cortado, eavesdropping on as many conversations as possible. Or at least I hope not, or I’d be in real trouble.

But if a consequence of that is that we’re lingering less outdoors - that feels like a tragedy in the making.

For starters, it’d make us forget about the commons, the shared public resources that we all have the right to use, the pavements and public benches and sea-walls we can sit on, dripping our ice-creams everywhere - you should go read everything by Antonia Malchik to learn about what happens if we lost access to those things by unthinkingly surrendering our right to them.

But it also turns the outdoors, particularly the urban outdoors, into something to hurry through because it’s an inconvenience - the kind we should find a way to technologise away as soon as possible.

The Demon In The Snow

(Fallout, Season 2, Episode 4)

So maybe we do need someone or something to be in the way, to encourage us to slow down a bit and find out what’s around us.

So how about this: next time you’re walking somewhere and you can spare an extra quarter or half-hour, deliberately take a wrong turn - and then, without doubling back on yourself, try to find a new route to where you were going in the first place.

Or: the next time you see a public bench, occupy it. Treat it like the invitation to “pointlessly” linger that it is.

I don’t know if anything interesting will happen if you do these things. That’s the whole point of serendipity and applied curiosity - they’re unpredictable.

But I bet they’d feel better than just scurrying through the world, furious with everything because you haven’t arrived yet, and having a non-experience you’ll never be able to remember. Surely life’s too short for a walk like that?

Thanks for listening.

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Images: Mike Sowden; Ryoji Iwata; Arto Marttinen; ben o’bro; Mark Stuckey; Will Francis.