Pedestrians in Mexico City
Almost everywhere I travel as a consultant, someone asks me whether it’s realistic to expect people to walk given the extremes of their climate.
They don’t just ask me this in Edmonton and Singapore. I’ve even been asked this about Los Angeles, where the climate is very mild by global standards. Well-traveled elites can form wildly nuanced intolerances about weather. But how much should these opinions matter?
For example, if you’re a popular economics pundit based in the bucolic climate of San Francisco, almost all of the world’s urban climates will seem extreme to you, so it may seem logical to say:
Visiting any country in the Global South makes you realize why walkable urbanism is dead. Walking around sucks when it’s hot. And the whole world is only getting hotter.
— Noah Smith 🐇 (@Noahpinion) October 7, 2025
And yet when I travel in the “Global South” I see lots of people walking. They may not be having an ideal experience. The infrastructure may uncomfortable or even unsafe. But they’re walking. They are probably walking because they can’t drive or can’t afford to buy a car, but then, their cities are already congested, so their cities wouldn’t function if everyone was in cars.
These people’s behavior matters. Once more with feeling: The functionality of a city, and of its transport system, arises from the sum of everyone’s choices about how to travel, not just the preferences of elites. When elites make pronouncements about what “people” will tolerate, while really speaking only of themselves, they mislead us about how cities actually succeed. They also demean the contributions of the vast majority of people who are in fact tolerating extreme weather to do whatever will give their lives meaning and value.
Most people don’t travel that much. Most people have therefore adapted, often unconsciously, to the climate where they live. (As they say in Saskatchewan, “there’s no bad weather, there are only bad clothes.”) There are ways to adapt to most weather conditions. There are things you can do as an individual, and then there are also things that great urban design and planning can do.
Are there extreme exceptions? Dubai comes to mind. I’ve walked in Dubai, scurrying from one rectangular block of Modernist shade to the next, often needing to cross high-speed streets full of reckless drivers. But Dubai’s problem is not that it would be impossible to walk there. It’s that the city was mostly designed by elites who assumed that nobody would walk (because they as elites wouldn’t walk) and they’ve therefore made choices that make walking difficult. There are pleasant walkable areas in Dubai, notably the historic port that was laid out back when everyone walked.
And in every city there will be times when walking is less pleasant. But people and economies adapt to that. The Spanish ritual of the siesta is a practical adaptation to the fact that it’s often unpleasantly hot in the mid-afternoon. So people often rest then, and instead drive their economies late into the evening. Most cities also tolerate a few days a year when the weather is so bad that the economy isn’t expected to function normally. In Portland, where I live, winter ice and snow have this effect; these events are so rare that the city can’t expect to handle them the way Chicago does. We mostly shut down the city for a day or two, and that ends up being the least bad solution.
The human ability to adapt is the key to our spectacular success on this planet. Our problem is that the people who lead our public conversations, our elites of wealth and opinion, are often some of the least adaptable people on earth. And when societies assume that we should listen to those people, we all end up internalizing the message that there’s something wrong with us if we even try to walk in Phoenix in July or Chicago in January.
And that’s wrong. Sometimes walking a few blocks is the key to liberty and prosperity in someone’s life. Most people do what makes sense in the place where they live. Only if we recognize that will we make the investments in urban design to make walking more bearable in extreme weather. And only then will our cities include everyone.
The greatest biking city in North America is Montreal. It may also be the best walking city. It is moderately hilly and by most standards very, very cold and snowy. Winter cycling is a big thing and growing. Walking in the winter has always been important, whether as a full trip in itself or to get to the nearest Metro or bus stop. If lots of people walk and bike in the winter in Montreal, they can walk and bike most places in the winter.
I generally like Noah Smith but I think he’s engagement farming with his tweet.
Smith does touch upon what could pose a problem for climate change as the Global South becomes wealthier. The poorer megacities are going to aspirationally design their cities like Sun Belt suburbs because that is how they see American wealth presented on TV. Everyone has a car, a house, a front yard and a back yard, a pool and a barbecue. Even if China ends up supplying them solar infrastructure and sells them EVs, consumerism is going to negate carbon reductions.
Even China is famous for having built an American-style subdivision and calling it Orange County.
I think this is the key problem about “American”-style development: it seems almost completely inarguable that even with EVs and renewables, it’s not going to be equally accessible to everyone if that means 9 billion people living that way. If it’s not accessible to (at least almost) everyone, then there’s no ethical justification that almost anyone (certainly not an entire nation of people) should have access to it.
This particular way of life–that is 20th century auto-centric development–was maybe a mistake we needed to make, an experiment in what the car could do for us. But I can’t help calling it a failed experiment, given the myriad and scale of the costs involved, for how little benefit it ultimately gives over a walking/cycling/rail development paradigm.
“there’s no bad weather, there are only bad clothes.” Well, if you’re in Phoenix in July, there are no good clothes. When global temperatures rise, more and more cities around the world will get the same situation. I’m not sure how investments in urban design could solve this. Of course, the ideal solution would be something like Toronto’s Path but that’s not realistic to have everywhere.
Investments in urban design like street trees, more green or natural spaces and more natural elements over asphalt and concrete all have an effect on temperature. Sure, it’s hot in the desert but Phoenix is a blueprint on how you shouldn’t build a city in the desert with endless urban and suburban sprawl and many miles of blacktop. Indianapolis has a system similar to the path in Toronto where you can get all around downtown in the winter while spending almost no time outside. It can be done quite easily in spaces that are walkable and also used in the summer in Indy when its 95 degrees and 100% humidity. BTW I would take 115% in Phoenix with no humidity 10 out of 10 times.
But there is still so much that can be done with design to make things much more tolerable. The ground temperature difference, in a place like Phoenix, in July, between an area with shade and vegetation versus a sun-blasted expanse of asphalt parking lot could be something like 25 degrees F. That could be the difference between hot but tolerable (who would expect anything different in Phoenix in July?) and intolerable bordering on deadly for certain people (the elderly, small children, people in poor health, etc).
The good news about places in the Sunbelt in the US, at least, is that it should be (conceptually at least) really easy to stop doing the incredibly stupid things we’ve been doing for so long.
People have been walking in Baghdad in the summer for thousands of years–and if I’m not mistaken, their climate is even hotter than Phoenix’s. So it should be possible for most cities to create a tolerable walking environment even under the climate changed world of 30-50 years from now. But we have to be way smarter about it than we have been.
I generally agree with Jarrett and Jake Wegmann (people not only walk in Baghdad, but also Libya, the Australian Outback, etc.) however, I know from some cycling data that heat seems to be a bigger deterrent to biking than cold/snow/rain. The Sun Belt has a reputation for being, well, sunny and people like to say “no one will bike in the rain”. However, biking rates are highest in places like Boulder, Brooklyn, Portland, Cambridge, Montreal and Minneapolis. Its true that for a few months out of the year biking isn’t great (cold, wet, snow, etc.) but for the other three seasons it is generally mild or at least not hot and so practical to bike to work, parties, etc. and arrive not sweaty or exhausted. In the Sun Belt cities the weather might be nice in the winter, but for 8-9 months out of the year it is hot enough that people do not want to exert themselves outdoors if they have a different option.
I’m not sure this is entirely an elite thing. A huge demographic shift in the US over the past half century has been people moving from more northern cities to the Sun Belt once air conditioning and cars made it possible for them to enjoy the warm winters without the penalties of the hot summers. Tens of millions of people have made/are making this choice, which is hardly just an economic elite. Nor is this an American only trait, globally the number of air conditioners sold each year is approximately double the number of cars sold.
I think E-bikes cancel out the heat penalty entirely.
Biking in hot weather is way better than walking since you always have a nice breeze.
People just don’t bike in the South because most of those places were developed after WWII (thanks to the consumerization of air conditioning) and thus are built terribly for bikes.
There absolutely are appropriate clothes for walking in Phoenix, the clothes that are worn in other deserts.
Robes, or other loose clothing, that covers all of your body from direct sunlight, which is loose enough that you have a layer of cooler air between your skin and the clothes that can circulate, so you’re protected from direct sunlight, but your sweat can evaporate rather than being soaked into your clothes. Think of the sorts of robes you see Bedouin wear. As long as you walk at a moderate pace and don’t rush, you’ll arrive without being sweaty or exhausted.
The problem here is more that that sort of total coverage clothing is culturally unacceptable in America.
In humid areas in the tropics on really hot days, wet-bulb temperatures can exceed human body temperature, at which point sweating can’t cool you down and hyperthermia can lead to heat exhaustion, heat stroke and serious medical conditions as a result (including death). This is the environment where walking is medically dangerous and, unlike extreme cold (or dry heat like a desert), there’s nothing that you can do about it with clothing.
Climate change will certainly make that problem more common – there increasingly are times of day on certain days where people have to stay in air conditioned environments as much as possible, and walking is a dangerous activity, and that will continue to increase in frequency.
The sentence “there’s no bad weather, there are only bad clothes.” I know from kindergarten of my son and internalized it. It was Forest kindergarten.
I just want to object to the idea Spanish people spend the day sleeping because it is too hot to work. Most people have standard office hours routines in Spain. I think the article is clear enough without this stereotype. The Spanish siesta is a thing for holidays and weekends (if anything), and not for everyone.
Modern Spain has air conditioning, and so people with office jobs don’t need to take a siesta. Go back 200 years and the siesta would be much more common. Even then I would expect a few people to be working in the heat of day (just like some people work at 3am).
Thanks Jarrett for an insightful column.
My article, “Cool Walkability Planning” (https://vtpi.org/cwi.pdf), first published in the Journal of
Civil Engineering and Environmental Sciences, and subsequently updated, provides guidance for addressing this problem.
It examines why and how to improve walkability in hot climate cities. It describes the Cool Walkshed Index (CWI) which rates shadeway and pedway network quality, suitable for planning applications. Currently, most cities have CWI ratings of D-F, which makes walking unpleasant and dangerous during hot periods; they should strive for A-C ratings to ensure pedestrian comfort. Achieving such targets requires decision makers to recognize the unique and important roles that walking plays in an equitable and efficient transportation system, and prioritize walkability improvements in planning and investment decisions.
This type of planning can repay its costs in direct benefits to uses, reductions in external costs of driving (less road and parking facility costs, congestion, crash risk and pollution), and through higher local property values (residents and businesses should be willing to pay higher rents for locations that connect to shadeways and pedways). The challenge face is that few transportation agencies take walking seriously and have funds to invest in high quality walkability, even if they provide high economic returns.
What do you think? Are cities ready to invest in cool walkability planning?
Thanks Jarrett!
This is an important and timely issue. Global warming and urbanization are increasing the number of people who experience extreme heat which reduces walk- and bikeability, and therefore public transit accessibility. Efficient and equitable transportation requires solutions.
My article, “Cool Walkability Planning” (www.vtpi.org/cwi.pdf), originally published in the Journal of Civil Engineering and Environmental Sciences and subsequently updated, examines why and how to improve walkability in hot climate cities. It describes the Cool Walkshed Index (CWI) which rates shadeway and pedway network quality, suitable for planning applications. Currently, most cities have low CWI ratings which
make walking unpleasant and dangerous during hot periods; they should strive for A-C ratings to ensure pedestrian comfort. Achieving such targets requires decision makers to recognize the unique and important roles that walking plays in an equitable and efficient transportation system, and prioritize walkability
improvements in planning and investment decisions.
Cool walkability planning can repay its costs through user benefits, reduced traffic external costs (less road and parking infrastructure expenses, congestion, crashes and pollution) and increased property values for homes and businesses that connect to shadeway and pedway networks. Achieving these benefits requires that transport agencies invest a fair share of resources in active mode facilities.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNRR8ncPkU0
This video gives overall the same point of view, with a slight difference : for him, people who can’t imagine facing the weather are not “elite”, but “people who spend their lives in their cars and never acclimate to the local weather”