Is Essen walkable?

This page covers Essen: 575,000 people.

67/100Typical walking score where people live. It mixes the walk to eight daily needs with how pleasant the streets are.

81%Essen is better than this share of places where people live, across the 20 countries on the map.

28thBy typical score, of the 84 cities in Germany on this site.

In Essen, the walk to a park is the strong point: 3 minutes for the typical building, much better than most of Europe. Its weakest point against Europe is the walk to culture, and even that is 10 minutes for the typical building, better than most of Europe. Walking is easiest in Rüttenscheid (score 84) and hardest in Byfang (score 42): a gap of 42 points.

The walk to eight daily needs

The typical walk is the middle value: half of the buildings in Essen 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.

Need	Typical walk	Compared with Europe	Buildings with one within 20 min
Groceries	6 min	Better than most	99%
Food and drink	5 min	Better than most	100%
Shops	4 min	Better than most	100%
Health	6 min	Better than most	98%
School	5 min	Better than most	99%
Parks	3 min	Much better than most	100%
Culture	10 min	Better than most	88%
Public transport	3 min	Better than most	100%

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 21,716,445 street cells in Germany from hardest to easiest to walk, then cut the list into five equal groups, called fifths. In Essen, 85% of the street cells are in the most walkable fifth, more than the 20% of an average place.

Share of the street cells in Essen in each fifth. The dashed line marks 20%, the share every fifth has in Germany.
Fifth of the street cells in Germany	Bar	Essen
Most walkable fifth		85%
Second fifth		9%
Middle fifth		4%
Fourth fifth		2%
Least walkable fifth		under 1%

The city at a glance

Each of the 2,257 hexagons groups the street cells within about 192 m of its centre and takes the shade of their middle fifth. The line is the boundary this page uses.

See Essen 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 46 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 Essen 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 Germany.
Area	Typical score	In the top fifth
Rüttenscheid	84	100%
Holsterhausen	84	100%
Frohnhausen	81	100%
Südviertel	80	100%
Borbeck-Mitte	78	100%

Least walkable

Letters A to E on the map.
Area	Typical score	In the top fifth
Byfang	42	46%
Leithe	56	95%
Frillendorf	57	98%
Schönebeck	58	100%
Bergeborbeck	59	91%

Cities like Essen

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

City	Country	People	Typical score
Bremen	Germany	586,000	69
Edinburgh	United Kingdom	516,000	68
Nuremberg	Germany	530,000	67

What this page covers

This page uses the boundary of Essen as Eurostat, the EU's statistics office, draws it. About 575,000 people live there (2025 figure). Inside it we scored 21,544 street cells with 148,652 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.