Coverage analysis
What 5 minutes on foot covers in New York.
New York is the only US market where drive-time analysis is often the wrong tool — but where it's used, the bridge-and-tunnel geometry creates the most extreme isochrone distortions in the country. Reachable area can vary by 5x depending on time of day and which crossing you route through.
At 5 minutes on foot, the New York walk-time isochrone captures the immediate pedestrian footprint — the area where pedestrian customers make routine, repeat visits without any deliberate trip planning — the true walkshed of impulse and convenience. Unlike a simple ≈ 400 m radius circle, the real pedestrian-network polygon follows New York's actual street grid, accounts for crossings, parks, and dedicated walk paths, and contracts sharply around freeways, rail corridors, and waterways that break pedestrian continuity.
Walk-shed area at 5 minutes: ≈ 0.2–0.4 km² in a standard urban grid. The 5-minute isochrone is the standard input for pedestrian trade-area analysis, walkability scoring, and proximity-retail siting.
The city-level population of 8,336,817 and a median household income of $70,663 give a sense of New York's density, but the figure that matters for walkable-retail siting is the population inside the pedestrian polygon — not the city as a whole. That number shifts dramatically depending on whether you're anchored in a high-density urban core or a lower-density neighbourhood where blocks are long and crossings are scarce. Use the tool above to set your actual candidate address, then generate the isochrone to see the real walk shed.