Pedestrian potential: where the streets, timetable and places invite walking
Where are people likely to walk past? MapBees counts no one, but it can show how much a hex's timetable, streets and everyday places invite walking. Pedestrian potential puts the three on one 0–100 scale. Here it is on Houston, inside the city limits: how to read it, how to use it to choose a street, the math behind it, and - honestly - what it can't tell you.
Pedestrian potential: how much a hex invites walking, mapped across Houston
Pedestrian potential is an estimate, 0–100 within the city, of how much the transit timetable, the streets and the everyday places around a hex invite walking. A hex is one hexagon on the map, about 350 m across (roughly 0.1 km²). It is not a count of people: MapBees counts no one walking past. It is what open data can say about where people are likely to be on foot.
Inside Houston's city limits, the hexes of downtown read 100: Travis, Milam and Louisiana Streets, where most METRO bus lines cross and the light rail runs down Main Street, on its dense street grid, with nearly every kind of everyday place within a 10-minute walk. Of the 11,372 hexes the map scores inside the city limits, the middle one reads 48, and nearly one in three has no train or bus leaving within a 10-minute walk at rush hour.
The map is a Score with one factor, Pedestrian potential, placed lowest to highest inside the city limits - so each hex's score reads as its Pedestrian potential. Hover any hex and its card shows the three parts behind the number.
Is Pedestrian potential the same as foot traffic?
No. Foot traffic is a count of people: someone on a corner with a clicker, a sensor on a lamppost, or a panel of phones. Those counts are rare, costly and seldom open, and MapBees holds no foot traffic counts at all.
What MapBees can show is why people would be on foot somewhere in the first place. They walk to catch a train or a bus. They walk along streets that connect to many other streets. And they walk to the places they need: a grocery store, a pharmacy, a café, a school. Pedestrian potential puts those three on one 0–100 scale, so it stands in for foot traffic - a proxy, in a researcher's word - rather than measuring it.
An estimate, not a count of people
Every surface that shows Pedestrian potential says so, and so does this post: Pedestrian potential is an estimate of how much the streets, timetable and places invite walking, 0–100 within the city; it is not a count of people. A hex that reads 100 can be quiet on a Sunday afternoon, and one that reads 20 can fill up for a game.
Where it helps:
Choosing a street for a shop or café
Where people are likely to pass on foot - and, with the café question below, where few cafés already serve them.
Comparing two addresses
Two buildings a mile apart can look alike on a listing. Their hexes show which one has the timetable, the streets and the places around it.
Planning and advocacy
Where the places and the streets are there but the buses are not, and the other way round: each part is a map of its own.
A first filter, never the last word
It narrows a city to the streets worth a visit. Walking them at the hours you care about is still the test.
The three parts, from a shop owner's point of view
Pedestrian potential is built from three measures, and each is a map of its own too. First what each one tells you, then how it is made.
Transit departures: how often a train or bus leaves
If a bus leaves the corner every two minutes, people walk to and from it all day. Transit departures (peak) counts the scheduled departures an hour from the stops in and around a hex on a normal weekday at rush hour, 7–10 and 16–19. It reads the timetable, not the people on board: it tells you how often a train or bus leaves, never how many people are on it.
In Houston most departures leave from downtown, where the METRO bus lines cross on Milam, Louisiana and Travis Streets: 196 an hour leave from one downtown hex at Preston and Congress Streets, and 1,180 an hour within a 10-minute walk of it. The busiest single station is the Texas Medical Center Transit Center, with 66 departures an hour. Out in Kingwood, the Park & Ride sends 3 an hour.
How it is made. MapBees reads the transit timetables (GTFS, the open format agencies publish their schedules in) of METRO Houston, Amtrak and Megabus. It picks a normal week from the next eight - the one with the median number of weekday trips, so a holiday week never sets the number; for this map, the week of December 7, 2026. It counts every departure in the window - a trip's last stop and drop-off-only stops do not count - and divides by the hours: 30 at peak, Monday to Friday. Platforms fold into their station, and a train that appears in two timetables counts once. Then each station is walked along streets and paths: the hex card shows every departure within a 10-minute walk, and the standing gives the nearer ones more weight - in full within about 3.5 minutes, 70% up to 7 and 40% up to 10, as within a 10-minute walk always does.
Street centrality: the streets that short walks share
Some streets are on the way to everywhere. Picture every short walk in the city - from each street corner to every other corner up to 800 m away, about 10 minutes on foot - and the shortest route for each one. Street centrality counts how many of those shortest walks pass along the streets of a hex, 0–100 within the city. A street that many short walks share is one people are likely to pass along: the main street, the bridge over the bayou, the path from the station. It describes the shape of the street network, not anyone actually walking on it.
Downtown's grid leads Houston - 84 of 100 on San Jacinto Street at Capitol Street - but central does not mean near downtown. The third most central hex inside the city limits is on West Bellfort Avenue at Briarbend Drive, in southwest Houston: a street with few other ways around it collects the short walks of everything nearby.
How it is made. The walkable streets come from Overture Maps (release 2026-10-21.0): residential streets up to main roads, living and pedestrian streets, footways, paths, steps, cycleways, service roads and tracks. Sidewalks drawn beside a road are left out, so one street does not count three times, and so is any street where walking is always forbidden. The streets are cut into pieces at every junction, the shortest walk is found between every pair of junctions at most 800 m apart, and every piece it uses gets one more. A hex's value is the length-weighted average of its pieces, divided by the count that only the top 1% of the city's street length reaches, and capped at 100 - so one bridge cannot squash every other street toward 0. Researchers call this betweenness centrality (Freeman, 1977), counted here only over walks of up to 800 m; studies link it to how many people walk a street (Hillier and Iida, 2005) and to where shops gather (Porta and others, 2009). Why 800 m: it is a 10-minute walk, and much longer walks start to trace the corridors cars use.
Everyday places: how many kinds within a 10-minute walk
People walk to what they need. Everyday places counts how many of 40 everyday kinds of place - a grocery store, a pharmacy, a café, a bank, a school, a park, a gym and more - are within a 10-minute walk of a hex. It counts kinds, not places: ten cafés and nothing else is 1 of 40, while a grocery store, a pharmacy and a café make 3.
It is not Everyday needs, the Question Library's six-kind question: Everyday places is the longer list, made for this measure. Downtown's top hexes reach 38 of 40, and no hex outside downtown does; Westheimer Road at Yorktown Street, in Uptown, reaches 35. Half of the hexes inside the city limits have 8 or fewer.
How it is made. The places come from Overture Maps (release 2026-08-19.0). A kind counts when at least one place of it is within a 10-minute walk along streets and paths. The kinds are not weighted: a museum counts as much as a grocery store. Show the math lists all 40.
Put together: a hex needs all three
Each part first becomes a standing: the share of the city's hexes with any of it that this hex is level with or above. Downtown's departures stand at 1.0, level with or above every other hex. Then the three standings are multiplied and the cube root taken - a geometric mean - and the result is shown 0–100:
Why multiply rather than add? A hex has to be decent at all three. A big transit center on a street nobody walks along, with nothing to do within 10 minutes, should not read like a main street - and in a sum it would. That is the geometric mean at work. Two rules keep it fair:
No departures within a 10-minute walk does not sink a hex to 0. Its departures standing counts at a floor of 0.10, so a good street full of shops is not erased by a missing bus. With the floor, a hex with no transit can reach at most 46.
No walkable street, or no everyday place within a 10-minute walk, reads 0. There is nothing there to walk to or along.
Hex details for the downtown hex at Preston and Congress Streets: each part with its own number, and the estimate sentence.The same hex's hover card on the map. Long lines are cut short there; Hex details shows them whole.
Worked example: the Kingwood Park & Ride
Kingwood sits at the north-east end of the city limits, about 37 km from downtown. The hex of its Park & Ride has a good street and plenty of places, and very little transit:
The Kingwood Park & Ride hex
Transit departures (peak), within a 10-minute walkstanding 0.161
3 an hour
Street centralitystanding 0.944
17 of 100
Everyday placesstanding 0.996
29 of 40 kinds
Multiplied
0.161 × 0.944 × 0.996 = 0.151
Cube root, × 100
100 × ∛0.151 = 53
Pedestrian potential
53
The standings are rounded here; the map uses the exact ones, which give 53.2. The streets and places stand high - what holds the hex back is 3 departures an hour.
The card calls 17 of 100 “one of the city's most central streets” because its words follow the standing, not the value: the standing counts every hex MapBees covers for Houston, and most of them carry far fewer short walks.
0.7 km south, a hex with 24 of 40 kinds of everyday place and a central street (28 of 100) has no departure at all within a 10-minute walk at rush hour. It counts at the floor: 100 × ∛(0.10 × 0.98 × 0.98) = 46.
The Kingwood Park & Ride hex: 53.0.7 km south: no departures within a 10-minute walk, so the floor - 46.
Where Houston invites walking
Closer in, the highest band runs unbroken from downtown through Midtown and west along Westheimer Road to Greenway, and south past the museums to the Texas Medical Center. Memorial Park and River Oaks read low, and Bellaire and West University Place are blank, because they are separate cities.
Next to it sit two measures of their own that are not part of Pedestrian potential:
Transit departures (night)
The same count for 22–2 on the four nights between two weekdays: where the city still moves late. Pedestrian potential uses the peak only.
Intersections
Street junctions where three or more streets meet in a hex; footpath, driveway and parking-aisle junctions do not count. Houston's densest hexes have 31, the middle one 4.
How to use it, step by step
The quickest start is a question. Open the Question Library, search for “Pedestrian potential”, and pick the café question: it scores Pedestrian potential against cafés within a 10-minute walk and the people who live there.
Where to click
Questions & guides
Search: Pedestrian potential
Pedestrian potential for a café
The two questions that use Pedestrian potential whole.
Six questions in the library are built on these measures:
Pedestrian potential for a café
Where do the streets invite walking but cafés are few? A Score with cafés within a 10-minute walk and the people who live there.
Pedestrian potential against shops
Where do the streets invite walking but shops are few? A Cross two map.
Side streets near everyday places
Where are side streets with everyday places within a 10-minute walk? Quieter streets, close to what people need.
Departures at rush hour
Where do trains, trams and buses leave most often at rush hour? Transit departures (peak) within a 10-minute walk.
Nightlife against night transit
Where is nightlife busy but night transit thin? Bars and nightlife crossed with night departures.
Street centrality against shops
Which central streets have few shops? Street centrality crossed with shops.
Or build your own Score: press Add measures, unfold Accessibility and tick Pedestrian potential beside anything else you care about.
Where to click
Add measures
Accessibility
Pedestrian potential
Accessibility lists the parts beside Transit stops and the rest; Pedestrian potential is the last row.
Crossed with shops on a Cross two map, Pedestrian potential shows where the streets invite walking but the shops have not arrived - the teal hexes below. In Houston 64 in every 100 hexes have no shop at all, so much of the city reads teal or gray.
A standing is the share of the city's hexes with a value above zero that a hex is level with or above. Hexes with none of a part do not pull the others' standings down; a hex with none stands at 0 - or, for departures, at the 0.10 floor.
Pedestrian potential = 100 × the cube root of the three standings multiplied, rounded to one decimal.
The standings span every hex MapBees covers for Houston - 49,568 of them, reaching 5 km past the city's box. That is why the city limits read high: half the hexes the map scores inside them read 48 or more, against about 23 across the whole covered area.
The map then places the hexes inside the city limits lowest to highest, so the top one reads 100 and the bottom one 0. Houston's limits hold both, so here each hex's score equals its Pedestrian potential.
No resident or building figure enters it. Who lives nearby is a factor you add yourself, as the café question does.
Show the math lists all of it, with the timetables and the sources and their dates:
Show the math for Houston's Pedestrian potential, method 1.10.
What Pedestrian potential can't tell you
It describes the streets, the timetable and the places - not the people
How many people walk past: MapBees holds no foot traffic counts.
Weekends, evenings or events: the departures are weekday rush hour.
Whether a walk is pleasant or safe: sidewalks, shade, heat, crossings and traffic are not in it.
Whether a place is open, good or crowded: a mall that has closed but still stands on a central junction keeps its mapped places until the map catches up.
How tall the buildings are: a street of towers and a street of houses with the same streets and places read alike.
Nearness to downtown: “central” is a street's place in the walking network.
It has not yet been compared with counts of people walking; that check is planned for cities that publish them.
The sources: transit timetables (GTFS) from METRO Houston, Amtrak and Megabus, for a normal week in December 2026; streets and junctions from Overture Maps (release 2026-10-21.0); places from Overture Maps (release 2026-08-19.0). Treat Pedestrian potential as a first filter, then go and stand on the street at the hours that matter to you.
Further reading, for the street network side:
Freeman, L. C. (1977). Sociometry, 40(1), 35–41: the paper that named the measure.
Hillier, B. and Iida, S. (2005). Network and psychological effects in urban movement. Spatial Information Theory (COSIT 2005), 475–490.
Porta, S., Crucitti, P. and Latora, V. (2006). The network analysis of urban streets: a primal approach. Environment and Planning B, 33(5), 705–725.
Porta, S. and others (2009). Street centrality and densities of retail and services in Bologna, Italy. Environment and Planning B, 36(3), 450–465.
Sevtsuk, A. and Mekonnen, M. (2012). Urban network analysis: a new toolbox for ArcGIS. Revue internationale de géomatique, 22(2), 287–305.
Pedestrian potential in eight lines
Pedestrian potential estimates, 0–100 within the city, how much a hex's timetable, streets and everyday places invite walking.
It stands in for foot traffic; it is not a count of people.
Transit departures: scheduled departures an hour at weekday rush hour, within a 10-minute walk.
Street centrality: how many shortest walks of up to 800 m share a hex's streets.
Everyday places: how many of 40 everyday kinds of place are within a 10-minute walk.
The three standings combine as a geometric mean, so a hex needs all three; no departures counts at a floor of 0.10.
Intersections and night departures are measures of their own, beside it.
Start from the question Pedestrian potential for a café, then walk the street before you decide.
An estimate, 0–100 within the city, of how much the transit timetable, the streets and the everyday places around a hex invite walking. It is the geometric mean of a hex's standing on Transit departures within a 10-minute walk, Street centrality and Everyday places. It is not a count of people.
Is Pedestrian potential the same as foot traffic?
No. Foot traffic is a count of people walking past, and MapBees holds no foot traffic counts. Pedestrian potential stands in for it: it shows where the timetable, the streets and the places give people a reason to be on foot.
Does MapBees have foot traffic data?
No. MapBees counts no one: it has no phone, card or sensor records. Pedestrian potential is built from open transit timetables, mapped streets and mapped places, and says how much a hex invites walking, not how many people walk there.
What goes into Pedestrian potential?
Three parts: scheduled transit departures an hour at weekday peak (7–10 and 16–19) within a 10-minute walk; Street centrality, how many shortest walks of up to 800 m pass along a hex's streets; and Everyday places, how many of 40 everyday kinds of place are within a 10-minute walk.
Why doesn't a hex with no bus or train nearby read 0?
Its departures standing counts at a floor of 0.10 instead of 0, so a good street full of shops is not erased by a missing bus. With that floor, a hex with no departures within a 10-minute walk can reach at most 46.
Does a central street mean a street near downtown?
No. Street centrality is a street's place in the walking network: how many short walks share it. In Houston, the third most central hex inside the city limits is on West Bellfort Avenue, in the southwest.
Has Pedestrian potential been checked against counts of people walking?
Not yet. That check is planned for cities that publish counts of people walking. Until then, treat it as a first filter, and walk the street yourself before you decide.
Which cities have Pedestrian potential?
Every city where MapBees has counted a transit timetable. A city without one does not get it, because one of its three parts would be missing.
See it on a real map
Open Houston's Pedestrian potential inside the city limits, hover any hex for its three parts, then try it in your own city.
Builds MapBees's location-intelligence pipeline end to end — census and Overture Maps ingestion, H3 hex scoring, and the map interface — and writes the methodology behind every number on the site.
