We live in cities, at least in part, to go fast. In his 1903 essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life”, German sociologist Georg Simmel wrote that cities confront us with “the swift and continuous shift of external and internal stimuli”. He suggested that, in contrast to the “slower, more habitual, more smoothly flowing rhythm” of rural life, urban environments drill into us the rapid “tempo and multiplicity of economic, occupational and social life”. So it’s no surprise that people in cities such as New York tend to walk at a fast clip. But here’s the thing: those brisk pedestrians have been getting faster. That’s one of the findings in a recent working paper by a group that includes economist Edward Glaeser and architect Carlo Ratti, published by the US National Bureau of Economic Research. What might seem like a minor data point about people’s perambulations is actually suggestive of a host of changes, not just in New York or in cities themselves but in the wider culture.

The researchers took a series of time-lapse films of various city streets, made by urbanist William “Holly” Whyte in 1980. He had a penchant for using the technique of direct observation to understand how people in cities behave, with the goal of improving those places. What he learned informed the design of innumerable successful urban spaces, including New York’s Bryant Park. The researchers then compared a series of videos made in the same spots in 2010 – from a corner of Bryant Park to Boston’s Downtown Crossing – with those by Whyte. Because the process is hugely time-consuming, the researchers used AI to conduct the analysis.

What they found was striking. Thirty years on, urban pedestrians were walking, on average, 15 per cent more quickly. Fewer people could also be described as “lingering”, from 43 per cent in 1980 to 26 per cent in 2010. There was also a decline in people forming groups on the street – either preplanned meetings or spontaneous encounters. “People are now spending less time in public spaces and moving through them at a faster pace,” the researchers concluded.

In terms of New York, the speed increase was arguably foreseeable, based on some broad findings about how people walk. A 1976 paper published in Nature journal found that the size of a place’s population had the strongest influence on residents’ walking speeds. The researchers argued that crowding resulted in “increased levels of personal stimulation”, which compelled people to walk faster to reduce it. And what happened in New York over the 30-year period covered by the pedestrian study? The population grew by some 15.6 per cent – the same percentage increase, curiously, as pedestrians’ average speeds.

In a 1999 study, psychologist Robert Levine highlighted another key factor in people’s “pace of life”: money. The richer a city was, the faster its residents would walk. “Faster-paced places will tend to be more economically productive,” wrote Levine, “which then raises the value of time and, subsequently, the pace of life.” In Manhattan, personal income per capita increased nearly fivefold between 1980 and 2010. By that measure, it’s a wonder that people on Sixth Avenue haven’t broken into an outright sprint.

The walking-speed finding correlates with the widespread sense that life is moving ever faster. In his 2013 book Social Acceleration, German sociologist Hartmut Rosa noted that it was easy to see how, in sheer technological terms, things had sped up. “We produce, communicate and transport not just faster but also more than previous epochs,” he wrote.

All of this, argued Rosa, was accompanied by a less legible but no less significant feeling of social acceleration, “a heightening of the tempo of life in the sense of a rise in the episodes of action and experience per unit of time” – think of all those notifications clogging up your phone. The result was that even though people statistically had more free time, they subjectively felt busier. And they were multitasking in new ways; the pedestrians of 1980s New York did not conduct phone calls or chat on apps such as Facetime while getting around. If people were walking more quickly, it might have had something to do with the sense that they were only keeping pace.

The question of whether an increase in pedestrian speed is a good or bad thing is complicated by the dual nature of pavements as both transit systems and human places. New York’s pavements, for example, offer a remarkably efficient, if sometimes overcrowded, way to move people. Whyte found that one congested pavement in Manhattan processed 38,000 people on foot in a 12-hour period. The adjacent parking lane, meanwhile, which consumed an equal amount of urban space, was taken up by 12 parked cars, carrying just 15 people.

So people moving faster means progress, right? Yet it’s hard not to think that something is being lost in this social acceleration. Urbanist Jane Jacobs once compared city pavements to a ballet – not a “simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse” but a more intricate production in which “the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts, which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole”.

Do we want our pavements to be sociable slow-food trattorias or ghost kitchens staffed by harried gig workers? “The ballet of the good city sidewalk,” wrote Jacobs, “never repeats itself from place to place and in any one place is always replete with new improvisation.”

“Life moves pretty fast,” as the hero of John Hughes’ 1986 teen comedy Ferris Bueller’s Day Off put it. “If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”