Walking more on your daily commute may be the simplest path to better health

A new study suggests you don’t need to carve extra minutes out of your day to get healthier. You might just need to change how your transit app plans your walking route.

By nudging trip planners to tolerate a bit more walking between bus and rail segments, most commuters can add meaningful physical activity without lengthening total travel time.

Extending your walking route

The study comes from Jonathan Rabinowitz’s Wellness Research Lab at Bar-Ilan University and his “More Walking Project,” conducted in collaboration with the Israeli Smart Transportation Research Center. 

The team analyzed potential public transport routes for more than 2,100 employees who commute to Bar-Ilan University.

Instead of optimizing exclusively for the shortest walks between transfers, the researchers raised the “acceptable walking” threshold inside the routing logic and re-generated options.

The result was surprisingly consistent. On average, people could add about nine extra minutes of walking to their trips and still arrive exactly when they would have under default settings. 

“This means you can leave home at the same time, get to work at the same time, and walk more along the way,” said Rabinowitz.

In some cases, the longer walking option even reduced time off the journey by avoiding slow transfers or infrequent connections.

Why this matters for health

Public health guidance is clear that modest, regular movement yields outsized benefits. A brisk daily walk of around 20 minutes is associated with substantial reductions in all-cause mortality risk. 

For people who struggle to fit workouts into crowded schedules, commutes are one of the few reliably routinized parts of the day. Embedding movement into that routine turns an abstract health goal into a default behavior.

That’s precisely the behavioral lever this project targets. Rather than asking commuters to add a gym session, it reframes existing trips.

The modified trips lead to “incidental exercise” – the extra block to a faster line, the short walk between stations, or the last leg on foot instead of a short feeder bus. Those minutes accumulate over a week without feeling like a separate task.

Walking just a bit more

The team dubbed the approach “Hacking the Map Apps for Active Transportation.” Most navigation platforms expose a “less walking” preference, either directly or via how they weigh transfers.

Flipping that preference – allowing longer but still reasonable walk segments – opened new route combinations with equal or better travel times in the Bar-Ilan sample.

The study is the first phase of a broader national effort to promote walking through smarter trip planning.

The next step is pragmatic: provide commuters with guidance for increasing walking using the apps they already use, then measure the real world behavior change.

Rabinowitz traces the idea to an experience that made the power of incremental movement tangible. “We saw how impactful small, consistent steps could be. This led us to ask: What if our daily maps nudged us to walk just a bit more?” 

That nudge, framed as an opt-in planning preference rather than a mandate, respects time constraints while shifting the default toward active travel.

A longer walk that is more efficient

Commuting is often constrained less by pure distance than by connection friction: waiting for an infrequent bus, missing a transfer by one minute, or detouring to another stop.

Allowing a slightly longer walk can reduce the number of transfers or avoid delays at congested nodes. In dense urban areas, those gains can offset the walking time, keeping total duration unchanged.

In effect, the study reframes walking not as dead time but as an active, reliable “mode” that competes well against short, slow feeder hops.

When planners and apps treat walking like this, commutes become both healthier and, at times, more efficient.

New walking route, big health gains

Because this approach works within existing infrastructure and existing apps, the barrier to adoption is minimal.

Employers can encourage a “more walking” setting in staff travel guidance. Agencies can surface “active” routes in official planners. And app developers can add a clear “maximize walking without adding time” toggle.

None of these require building anything new, yet all could shift large populations toward daily, habitual movement.

Thus, small tweaks to how we plan everyday travel can unlock large health gains, no calendar reshuffle required. Or, as Rabinowitz concluded, it’s a simple shift with significant benefits.

The study is published in the journal BMC Public Health.

—–

Like what you read? Subscribe to our newsletter for engaging articles, exclusive content, and the latest updates.

Check us out on EarthSnap, a free app brought to you by Eric Ralls and Earth.com.

—–