Urban Flow: Decoding Foot Traffic in NYC

Why It Matters

By turning sparse counts into citywide, comparable pedestrian-exposure metrics and forecasts, the model enables more equitable, data-driven allocation of infrastructure, safety interventions and regulatory decisions that have been historically biased toward motorized modes. Confidence:85.

Summary

At the MIT Mobility Forum, researchers led by Andres Sevtsuk presented a Nature Cities study, developed with New York DOT data, that builds a pedestrian travel-demand model for NYC using urban network analysis and an open-source Python toolkit. The model extrapolates limited foot-traffic counts to estimate peak-hour pedestrian volumes on every sidewalk, crosswalk and footpath, and can vary by day and season. Panelists highlighted applications including normalizing crash, pollution and heat exposure metrics by pedestrian exposure, prioritizing sidewalk and public-space investments, and forecasting impacts of land-use or street-design changes. The work fills a major data gap—walking is NYC’s dominant mode yet is poorly measured—and creates a framework for scalable, policy-relevant pedestrian metrics.

Original Description

Walking is the most common way people get around cities, but it’s surprisingly undermeasured - even in cities such as NYC where walking makes up a significant modal share of all trips. In this session we will present and discuss new research that builds the first city-wide model of pedestrian traffic during peak times in New York City and uses it to evaluate infrastructure and safety.

The results show that many streets outside Manhattan have foot traffic levels like those in central areas, yet they aren’t prioritized for pedestrian infrastructure, pointing to possible inequities in investment.

Join us for a presentation from the authors – Andres Sevtsuk and Rounaq Basu and further discussion and commentary from Jascha Franklin-Hodge, former Chief of Streets, City of Boston to understand how better data on pedestrian movement can reveal hidden patterns of inequality and risk, helping cities design safer, more inclusive streets.

The panel will discuss:

•What does a city-wide model of foot traffic actually let us do differently in planning practice?

•Where are the biggest gaps between modeled pedestrian demand and current street, sidewalk, and curb investment?

•How transferable is the New York model to other US cities, and what data or assumptions break first?