As the summer holidays and the Olympics approach, millions of tourists are expected in France in the coming months. But which French cities are more or less easy to discover on foot? A new study, conducted by the language learning platform Preply, analyzed the walking distance between the five most popular tourist attractions in each French city, using data from Tripadvisor and Google Maps, in order to identify the least pedestrian-friendly cities.
Almost a medal for Nantes
The study reveals that Nantes is one of the most accessible French cities on foot, where it takes 40 minutes of walking to discover the key tourist sites in one day. It takes 2.9km and nearly 3770 steps to visit the must-sees. With numbers that elevate it, Nantes ranks in the glorious top 5, in 4th place, just behind Rennes, Nîmes, and Dijon which takes the gold medal.
.On the flip side, the five cities that the study revealed to be the least pedestrian-friendly are Marseille, Aix-en-Provence, Montpellier, Clermont-Ferrand, and Bordeaux.
Methodology
"To choose the list of cities to analyze, we examined the largest population centers in France. In total, 25 cities were analyzed. From the list of cities, we used TripAdvisor to find the top five tourist attractions in each city, based on visitor ratings. For each city, each attraction was analyzed on Google Maps itinerary planner to find the fastest walking route to visit the five attractions. The distances and walking times were then recorded. To estimate the number of steps taken, we used a conversion rate of 1,315 steps per kilometer, based on an average step length of 76 cm."