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There’s no better way to get to know a city than on foot and in Vancouver, we’re blessed with some of the best (and coolest) streets to traverse.
To find out which cities around the world do walkability best, Time Out surveyed 24,000 urbanites from around the world to ask how pedestrian-friendly their home city is.
The final ranking reflects the highest percentage of locals who rated their city’s walkability ‘good’ or ‘amazing’ and only features the highest scoring city for each country.
Love pounding the pavement? Check out who made the cut.
What’s the most walkable city for 2026?
Seoul took out the top spot on the list’s tenth installment, with locals rating it an impressive 93 per cent on walkability. Edinburgh followed closely behind with another 93 per cent seal of approval (despite all the hills) and rounding out the top three was New York City.
Vancouver represented Canada on the list, ranking at number 17, with a 73 per cent walkability score.
What makes Vancouver walkable?
Vancouver is one of the world’s best cities for good reason. Bursting with restaurants, shops, landmarks, beaches, parks and a new Time Out Market opening this spring, there’s plenty of things to do – often just a few suburbs apart. For anyone new in town, Vancouver’s Downtown is simple to navigate on foot with compact streets connecting all the best hotels and Airbnbs with shopping areas, museums and waterfront views.
For some walkable activities, Stanley Park ought to top the list with its whopping 1,000 acres to explore and easily fill a day. The nearby Robson street is also worth a detour if you’ve worked up an appetite and just a little bit further is the picturesque Gastown, teeming with bars and old-world charm.
There’s plenty of other streets well-worth a stroll including Main Street, otherwise dubbed ‘Michelin Mile’ and Cambie Street, which was recently named one of Canada’s coolest.
Vancouver is also very cycle-friendly so if you want to tick off a few major boroughs in a day we recommend moving between Mount Pleasant, Commercial Drive and Kitsilano. Each has plenty of shops, eateries, cinemas and shops to pop in along the way – in fact, you may need more than one day to get through this lot.
These are the world’s 20 most walkable cities, according to locals
- Seoul (93 percent)
- Edinburgh (93 per cent)
- New York City (91 percent)
- Copenhagen (90 percent)
- Oslo (89 percent)
- Stockholm (88 percent)
- Paris (88 percent)
- Singapore (86 percent)
- Helsinki (85 percent)
- Kraków (83 percent)
- Riga, Latvia (83 percent)
- Vienna, Austria (83 percent)
- Amsterdam, Netherlands (81 percent)
- Tallinn, Estonia (80 percent)
- Zurich, Switzerland (79 percent)
- Taipei, Taiwan (79 percent)
- Vancouver, Canada (78 percent)
- Macau, China (78 percent)
- Melbourne, Australia (76 percent)
- Munich, Germany (75 percent)