Is Messina walkable?

This page covers Messina: 217,000 people.

Questa pagina in italiano

42/100Typical walking score where people live. It mixes the walk to eight daily needs with how pleasant the streets are.
42%Messina is better than this share of places where people live, across the 20 countries on the map.
33rdBy typical score, of the 39 cities in Italy on this site.

In Messina, the walk to public transport is the strong point: 2 minutes for the typical building, much better than most of Europe. The walk to culture is the weak point: most buildings have none within 20 minutes. Walking is easiest in Torre Vittoria (score 66) and hardest in Mortelle (score 30): a gap of 36 points.

The walk to eight daily needs

The typical walk is the middle value: half of the buildings in Messina 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
Groceries9 minAbout typical73%
Food and drink8 minAbout typical78%
Shops7 minAbout typical79%
Health8 minBetter than most79%
School10 minAbout typical64%
Parks9 minWorse than most74%
Cultureover 20 minNothing within 20 minutes for most buildings42%
Public transport2 minMuch better 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 13,208,252 street cells in Italy from hardest to easiest to walk, then cut the list into five equal groups, called fifths. In Messina, 30% of the street cells are in the most walkable fifth, more than the 20% of an average place.

Share of the street cells in Messina in each fifth. The dashed line marks 20%, the share every fifth has in Italy.
Fifth of the street cells in ItalyBarMessina
Most walkable fifth
30%
Second fifth
21%
Middle fifth
20%
Fourth fifth
16%
Least walkable fifth
13%

The city at a glance

123ABC
Each of the 2,522 hexagons groups the street cells within about 167 m of its centre and takes the shade of their middle fifth. The line is the boundary this page uses.
See Messina 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 7 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 Messina 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 Italy.
AreaTypical scoreIn the top fifth
6685%
6096%
4160%

Least walkable

Letters A to E on the map.
AreaTypical scoreIn the top fifth
3030%
3026%
369%

Cities like Messina

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

CityCountryPeopleTypical score
VästeråsSweden161,00042
UppsalaSweden248,00044
JyväskyläFinland149,00042

What this page covers

This page uses the boundary of Messina as Eurostat, the EU's statistics office, draws it. About 217,000 people live there (2025 figure). Inside it we scored 11,791 street cells with 19,354 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.