Is Milton Keynes walkable?

This page covers Milton Keynes: 268,000 people, including Bletchley and Newport Pagnell.

54/100Typical walking score where people live. It mixes the walk to eight daily needs with how pleasant the streets are.
60%Milton Keynes is better than this share of places where people live, across the 20 countries on the map.
76thBy typical score, of the 105 cities in the United Kingdom on this site.

In Milton Keynes, the walk to a park is the strong point: 2 minutes for the typical building, much better than most of Europe. The walk to shops is the weak point: 9 minutes for the typical building, about typical for Europe. Walking is easiest in Woburn Sands (score 69) and hardest in Lower Weald in Calverton (score 43): a gap of 26 points.

The walk to eight daily needs

The typical walk is the middle value: half of the buildings in Milton Keynes have a shorter walk, and half have a longer one. The words compare it with every place where people live in the 20 countries on the map, so the same minutes get the same word everywhere.

NeedTypical walkCompared with EuropeBuildings with one within 20 min
Groceries7 minBetter than most93%
Food and drink7 minAbout typical97%
Shops9 minAbout typical87%
Health11 minAbout typical78%
School6 minBetter than most95%
Parks2 minMuch better than most97%
Culture9 minBetter than most85%
Public transport4 minBetter than most98%

Compared with the rest of the country

The map is cut into six-sided cells 55 m across, and every cell that a street passes through gets a score: we call these street cells. We sort all 8,553,993 street cells in Great Britain (the United Kingdom without Northern Ireland, which the map scores together with Ireland) from hardest to easiest to walk, then cut the list into five equal groups, called fifths. In Milton Keynes, 56% of the street cells are in the most walkable fifth, more than the 20% of an average place.

Share of the street cells in Milton Keynes in each fifth. The dashed line marks 20%, the share every fifth has in Great Britain.
Fifth of the street cells in Great BritainBarMilton Keynes
Most walkable fifth
56%
Second fifth
20%
Middle fifth
13%
Fourth fifth
8%
Least walkable fifth
4%

The city at a glance

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Each of the 2,071 hexagons groups the street cells within about 221 m of its centre and takes the shade of their middle fifth. The line is the boundary this page uses.
See Milton Keynes on the map

On the map, click any street to see its score and the walk to each need.

The most and least walkable areas

Each street cell takes the name of the nearest neighbourhood, village or town on OpenStreetMap, up to 1.5 km away. We rank the 9 areas where people live: each has at least 200 street cells and 500 buildings, and at least a quarter as many buildings per street cell as Milton Keynes as a whole, so ports, hill parks and farmland drop out. Click a name to open it on the map.

Most walkable

Numbers 1 to 5 on the map. In the top fifth: share of the area’s street cells in the most walkable fifth in Great Britain.
AreaTypical scoreIn the top fifth
6958%
6893%
6290%
6174%

Least walkable

Letters A to E on the map.
AreaTypical scoreIn the top fifth
4331%
4315%
4420%
5784%

Cities like Milton Keynes

These three cities come closest to Milton Keynes in number of people and typical score, from any of the 20 countries. Milton Keynes scores higher than 2 of them and lower than 1.

CityCountryPeopleTypical score
TrondheimNorway287,00054
WalsallUnited Kingdom282,00054
SunderlandUnited Kingdom277,00053

What this page covers

This page uses the boundary of Milton Keynes as Eurostat, the EU's statistics office, draws it. Besides Milton Keynes itself, it takes in Bletchley, Newport Pagnell, Wolverton, Stony Stratford, Woburn Sands, Fenny Stratford and smaller places. About 268,000 people live there (2018 figure). Inside it we scored 19,011 street cells with 36,008 buildings in them.

Every number here comes from the same scores as the map. The score runs from 0 to 100. The walk to eight daily needs on real streets makes up 60% of it, and how pleasant the streets are makes up 40%. The comparison with Europe counts every place by its buildings, 163,668,724 buildings in all. How the score works.