What travelers report, and why there is no single number
One study has measured it: Edwards and Griffin (2013) tracked 154 groups of tourists in Sydney and Melbourne with GPS devices and found they walked between 10 and 35 km a day. That range is wide and comes from two cities, so it shows how much tourists' days vary rather than a typical figure. The rest is self-reported. In a 2016 Rick Steves forum thread, replies commonly put a big-city day at 6 to 8 miles, with 10 to 12 on longer days and 15 or more on a few, and only some had measured it with a pedometer or phone. In a 2018 thread, typical averages were 5 to 7 miles, with single days from 3 to 12.
Treat those figures as what keen walkers manage, not as a standard. A better reference is your own normal day. In a 2017 Stanford study published in Nature, 717,527 users of one smartphone activity app in 111 countries averaged 4,961 steps a day. Your phone's step history for an ordinary week tells you where you sit. A first travel day close to that number is an easier start than a forum-sized 10-mile day; you can add more once you know how your feet are coping.
How much of the day is walking between stops
To see where a sightseeing day's distance comes from, we took eight days from our sample walking itineraries, each with three neighboring stops, and measured the walk between them two ways: as straight lines between the map pins, and as the shortest walking route on OpenStreetMap's streets and paths.
| Sample day | Stops in order | Straight line | Street route | Extra |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| New York, day 2 | Times Square, Rockefeller Center, SUMMIT One Vanderbilt | 1.3 km | 1.8 km | +37% |
| Boston, day 1 | Boston Public Garden, Boston Common, Beacon Hill | 0.8 km | 1.0 km | +29% |
| Paris, day 3 | Musée d'Orsay, Palais Royal, Louvre | 1.1 km | 1.7 km | +50% |
| London, day 1 | Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey, London Eye | 1.8 km | 2.2 km | +21% |
| London, day 3 | British Museum, Covent Garden, Southbank Centre | 1.7 km | 2.3 km | +33% |
| Rome, day 2 | Capitoline Museums, Pantheon, Piazza Navona | 1.1 km | 1.7 km | +49% |
| Prague, day 1 | Charles Bridge, Kampa Island, Lennon Wall | 0.4 km | 0.6 km | +61% |
| Florence, day 1 | Uffizi Gallery, Ponte Vecchio, Palazzo Pitti | 0.6 km | 0.7 km | +18% |
Distances between map pins, measured 8 October 2026. Street routes from the OSRM foot profile on routing.openstreetmap.de (map data © OpenStreetMap contributors). Percentages use unrounded distances. Method and limits below.
On every one of these days, the walking between sights is short: 2.3 km at most, even on the street. So if your phone shows 10 km at the end of a day like this, at least three-quarters of it came from somewhere else: the walk to the first stop and back, the galleries and gardens themselves, lunch, and the detours you took because a street looked interesting.
How much longer a street route is than the map line
You may read that real routes run 30 to 40% longer than the line on the map. For short hops between neighboring sights, that is about what we found: the median of our eight days was 35%, with a range from 18% in Florence to 61% in Prague. In distance, though, the extra was only 0.1 to 0.6 km per day.
Across whole cities the figure is lower. Geoff Boeing routed 50,000 random walking trips in each of 40 US cities on OpenStreetMap data (The Morphology and Circuity of Walkable and Drivable Street Networks, 2019). The average walking route was 14% longer than the straight line in Manhattan, 18% in Chicago, 19% in Boston and 21% in San Francisco, rising to 49% in Salem, Massachusetts. The middle of his 40 cities is about 26% (our calculation from his table). Those are trips across a whole city, mostly several kilometers long, so they say less about a 500 m hop around a museum block than our sample days do.
For planning, our rule from these eight days: add about a third to a short straight-line hop. That landed within about 200 m of the street route on each of them. For anything longer, or with a river or a hill in the way, open walking directions instead of guessing.
Plan the day by stops, not by kilometers
Because the hops between neighboring stops are short, the number and size of the stops shape a day more than the gaps between them do. That is our reading of the numbers above, not a measured result. A large museum, a park you walk end to end, or a market you browse can each take more walking than the route that got you there.
The CityWalk Plan pace setting follows the same idea: Easy plans fewer stops a day, Balanced sits in the middle, and Packed fits in the most sightseeing. Whichever you choose, mark the big stops when you read your plan, and keep them to one or two a day if you want energy left for the evening.
Two more habits help on a multi-day trip. Follow a long or packed day with an easier one, and pace the group for its slowest walker rather than its fastest. A day moves at the speed of whoever is most tired.
When the gaps are too far to walk
In some cities the sights themselves are far apart. In our comparison of the most walkable US cities for sightseeing, only 6 of Los Angeles's 20 best-known sights and 5 of Orlando's fit inside one 2 km circle, against 15 of 20 in Washington, DC. There, the right plan is to walk within each neighborhood and take a train, bus or taxi between them. Our guide to walking a city by neighborhood shows how to group a day that way.
Adjust for conditions
Heat and humidity make the same distance harder, and turn shade, water and indoor breaks into part of the route. Hills, cobbles, stairs, station transfers and museum queues add effort that a distance figure does not show, and crowds slow the pace even on short hops.
Start the first day, especially after a long flight, at the low end of what you normally walk. If the weather is mild and the city flat, add an optional stop nearby; if conditions are hard, drop a stop rather than rushing the rest. If you use a mobility aid or manage pain, fatigue or balance, check surfaces, slopes, rest points and step-free transit with current local sources, and see our guide to planning accessible city walks.
Count the whole day
The walk between sights is only one part of what your phone will record. Add the walk from your hotel to the first stop and back, station corridors and platform changes, the inside of each sight, meals, shopping and wrong turns. Where you stay changes the first and last of these more than anything else: a base inside the area you are exploring takes that walk off the day.
An evening check is more useful than any general target. Note when your energy dropped, whether your feet or your attention went first, and how you felt the next morning, then shorten or extend the next day to match. Wear shoes you have already broken in; our city walker tips cover footwear and the rest of the kit, and how long it takes to walk Manhattan works the same question through for one city in hours rather than kilometers.
How we measured the sample days
We took eight days from our 3-day sample itineraries, each with three stops in a walkable center. We checked every stop's map pin against its Wikipedia coordinates (all within 170 m) and left out days with pins we could not confirm. Straight lines are great-circle distances between consecutive pins. Street routes are the shortest walking route between the same pins from the public OSRM foot-routing server run by FOSSGIS on OpenStreetMap data, requested on 8 October 2026.
- Pins, not doors. A pin marks the middle of a site, so the real walk from entrance to entrance can be a little shorter or longer.
- Shortest route, not your route. Routing picks the shortest legal path. People take the nicer street, and closures or crowds can change the line.
- Eight sample days across seven cities (including two London days). All are compact centers with three stops a day. Spread-out cities and fuller days give longer hops, as the Los Angeles comparison shows.
This article was drafted with AI assistance from our sample itineraries and the sources linked above; the figures were checked against those sources.
Before you go
- Look up your normal daily steps or distance on your phone. That is your baseline for day one.
- For each day, count the stops and mark the big ones: a large museum, a park loop, a market.
- Open each day's stops in walking directions. If the hops add up to more than a few kilometers, split the day or plan a ride for the longest gap.
If a day still looks long, swap one big stop for a smaller one nearby, or leave a gap to rest. The case for doing that is in our argument for a loose itinerary.