Is Preston walkable?

This page covers Preston: 142,000 people.

62/100Typical walking score where people live. It mixes the walk to eight daily needs with how pleasant the streets are.
72%Preston is better than this share of places where people live, across the 20 countries on the map.
36thBy typical score, of the 105 cities in the United Kingdom on this site.

In Preston, the walk to public transport is the strong point: 3 minutes for the typical building, better than most of Europe. Its weakest point against Europe is the walk to a park, and even that is 5 minutes for the typical building, better than most of Europe. Walking is easiest in Avenham (score 74) and hardest in Cottam in Woodplumpton (score 46): a gap of 28 points.

The walk to eight daily needs

The typical walk is the middle value: half of the buildings in Preston 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
Groceries6 minBetter than most97%
Food and drink6 minBetter than most98%
Shops5 minBetter than most98%
Health8 minBetter than most92%
School6 minBetter than most98%
Parks5 minBetter than most98%
Culture10 minBetter than most86%
Public transport3 minBetter than most99%

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 Preston, 41% of the street cells are in the most walkable fifth, more than the 20% of an average place.

Share of the street cells in Preston in each fifth. The dashed line marks 20%, the share every fifth has in Great Britain.
Fifth of the street cells in Great BritainBarPreston
Most walkable fifth
41%
Second fifth
23%
Middle fifth
18%
Fourth fifth
12%
Least walkable fifth
5%

The city at a glance

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Each of the 2,308 hexagons groups the street cells within about 145 m of its centre and takes the shade of their middle fifth. The line is the boundary this page uses.
See Preston 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 Preston 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
74100%
7199%
6897%
6189%

Least walkable

Letters A to E on the map.
AreaTypical scoreIn the top fifth
4641%
5034%
5472%
5791%

Cities like Preston

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

CityCountryPeopleTypical score
LimogesFrance141,00061
IngolstadtGermany141,00061
South TynesideUnited Kingdom150,00062

What this page covers

This page uses the boundary of Preston as Eurostat, the EU's statistics office, draws it. About 142,000 people live there (2018 figure). Inside it we scored 10,007 street cells with 28,924 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.