City on Foot About
About City on Foot
Small, honest tools for people who like to see a city at walking pace.
What it is
City on Foot answers the everyday questions of walking: how long it will take, how far your steps went, what pace you walked, roughly what energy it used, how a day of sightseeing fits together, what a recorded route looks like, and how much daylight you have. It is free, needs no account and shows no ads.
How it works
Every calculation runs as JavaScript in the page you are reading. Nothing you type, and no GPX file you open, is sent to a server. Once a page has loaded it keeps working offline, which is handy on patchy mobile data.
Where the numbers come from
- Walking speeds: published research on normal adult walking speed (Bohannon and Williams Andrews, Physiotherapy, 2011), with 4, 5 and 6 km/h presets.
- Hills on the walking time calculator: Naismith's rule (1892), one minute per 10 metres of climb.
- Step length: the common pedometer rule of thumb of 41.3% (women) or 41.5% (men) of height.
- Calories: MET values from the 2024 Adult Compendium of Physical Activities.
- Sunrise and sunset: the NOAA solar position algorithm, checked against the US Naval Observatory.
- GPX distances: the haversine formula on a sphere of the Earth's mean radius.
Each tool page explains its method under “How this is worked out”. All results are estimates: people, pavements and weather vary.
Contact and feedback
There is no account system and no contact form. The site is a set of static pages; the privacy page says exactly what the server sees.