Is Maastricht walkable?

This page covers Maastricht: 125,000 people.

Deze pagina in het Nederlands

66/100Typical walking score where people live. It mixes the walk to eight daily needs with how pleasant the streets are.
79%Maastricht is better than this share of places where people live, across the 20 countries on the map.
16thBy typical score, of the 31 cities in the Netherlands on this site.

In Maastricht, the walk to culture is the strong point: 6 minutes for the typical building, much better than most of Europe. Its weakest point against Europe is the walk to shops, and even that is 6 minutes for the typical building, better than most of Europe. Walking is easiest in Maastricht-Centrum (score 78) and hardest in Borgharen (score 42): a gap of 36 points.

The walk to eight daily needs

The typical walk is the middle value: half of the buildings in Maastricht 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 most96%
Food and drink6 minBetter than most97%
Shops6 minBetter than most99%
Health7 minBetter than most93%
School6 minBetter than most98%
Parks3 minBetter than most100%
Culture6 minMuch better than most99%
Public transport3 minBetter than most100%

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 1,931,104 street cells in the Netherlands from hardest to easiest to walk, then cut the list into five equal groups, called fifths. In Maastricht, 52% of the street cells are in the most walkable fifth, more than the 20% of an average place.

Share of the street cells in Maastricht in each fifth. The dashed line marks 20%, the share every fifth has in the Netherlands.
Fifth of the street cells in the NetherlandsBarMaastricht
Most walkable fifth
52%
Second fifth
24%
Middle fifth
12%
Fourth fifth
10%
Least walkable fifth
2%

The city at a glance

123ABC
Each of the 1,756 hexagons groups the street cells within about 110 m of its centre and takes the shade of their middle fifth. The line is the boundary this page uses.
See Maastricht 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 6 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 Maastricht 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 the Netherlands.
AreaTypical scoreIn the top fifth
7899%
6883%
6684%

Least walkable

Letters A to E on the map.
AreaTypical scoreIn the top fifth
42under 1%
6145%
6376%

Cities like Maastricht

These three cities come closest to Maastricht in number of people and typical score, from any of the 20 countries. Maastricht scores higher than all three.

CityCountryPeopleTypical score
BayonneFrance124,00065
SetúbalPortugal124,00065
IpswichUnited Kingdom138,00066

What this page covers

This page uses the boundary of Maastricht as Eurostat, the EU's statistics office, draws it. About 125,000 people live there (2024 figure). Inside it we scored 5,479 street cells with 59,665 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.