Fox: U.S. needs to step up with walking

About a year and a half ago, I became one of those people who track how many steps they walk each day. I know there’s nothing magical about the daily 10,000-step target, but it’s a fun little pastime, made more fun by the fact that I surpass 10,000 most days without really trying.

That’s because I live in Manhattan, with a dog to walk, errands to run and a commute that usually consists either of a subway ride and then a walk across Central Park, or a bike ride mostly through the park during which I occasionally go slowly enough that the steps app on my phone thinks I’m running.

Away from home, hitting 10,000 has proved much harder.

It’s not just me. Most Americans don’t live in places like Manhattan, and they walk a lot fewer than 10,000 steps a day. A study published in 2010 found that U.S. adults averaged 5,117 steps daily and that this was lower than the averages in Switzerland, western Australia and Japan. Another study from 2017, using smartphone activity data from 111 countries and territories, found that U.S. participants averaged 4,774 steps a day, which was below the global average of 4,961.

This is definitely a lot less than people used to walk. Data from the U.S. Census Bureau hint that Americans used to get in a lot more steps six decades ago, with the share of workers who commute primarily by walking falling sharply since 1960. The percentage getting to work by public transportation, which often involves a lot of walking, is also down, from 12.1 percent in 1960 to 3.2 percent in 2022.

The explanation for the decline in walking since the 1960s and Americans’ below-average international showing seems clear: It’s cars. During the second half of the 20th century, almost all new development in the U.S. was oriented around automobiles, and the nation became one of the most car-dependent countries on the planet.

If you live or work or both in a place built for cars, walking more than short distances tends to be something you have to set out to do intentionally. It’s exercise, not a way of getting from point A to point B. So most people do less of it, with likely implications for obesity rates, life expectancy and other measures that have been headed in the wrong direction in the U.S. in recent years.

A key metric tracked in that 2017 smartphone-based study of walking around the world was what the authors, a group of Stanford University researchers, called “activity inequality.” This measured how widely dispersed the number of daily steps was among a population, and was according to the authors “a better predictor of obesity prevalence in the population than average activity volume.”

Among U.S. cities for which the study had data, activity inequality was lowest in New York, Boston, Jersey City, Washington and San Francisco. Over the past few decades these low-activity-inequality cities all experienced revivals, returning to growth after decades of decline.

The urban revival began to fizzle in the mid-2010s. Then came the COVID-19 pandemic, which temporarily shut down many of the activities that make cities attractive and brought what seems to be a permanent shift toward remote work.

Overall, I would assume that the decline in commuting and the population shift from cities has resulted in Americans getting even less physical activity than they did before the pandemic, with activity inequality rising.

Turning around the activity decline would probably require another urban revival, which seems like a tough sell right now. When it comes to where people choose to live, I think many in the U.S. exhibit what Marxists call false consciousness — they’ve been so brainwashed by car culture that they don’t understand they’d be healthier and happier living someplace where they didn’t always need to drive. But it’s also true that the places in the U.S. that are most friendly to pedestrians often aren’t so friendly in other ways. Housing can be extremely expensive, the schools often underperform, there are issues with crime and public disorder. Making Americans more active and healthy may require better urban governance.

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business and economics.