A new study published today shows that the average walking speed of people around the world has increased about 10% in the past decade. They studied 32 cities, measuring the time it took people to cross a 60 foot space, only timing people who were alone, not on cell phones and not carrying anything. Turns out that men move about 25% faster than women, and that the average speed of walking has increased since the last time measurements were taken, in 1997.

But we don’t care about any of that do we? Whenever we hear that NYC was ranked in a study contrasting it with other cities all we care about is where we fell in the rankings right? Well… in this particularly study we rank 8th. New Yorkers are the 8th fastest walkers in the world. The fastest? Singapore. Singapore walkers crossed the study’s 60 feet nearly a second and a half faster than New Yorkers did, at 10.55 seconds compared to our 12 seconds. But the real question here might be what the hell is going on in Malawi? It took residents of Blantyre, Malawi (it’s in southern Africa) nearly 32 seconds to travel 60 feet. That’s 1.25 mph compared to our 3.5!

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