Two kinds of getting around
Some days you just need to cross town for work or groceries. Other days you need a flight home. These are different problems, and a place can be good at one and poor at the other. You can land in a city with a huge airport and still spend an hour crossing the city by bus. The mobility score measures both, and always shows them side by side.
How we work it out
We score two sides of getting around, each on its own.
- Getting around town. Walking, public transit, cycling, driving, and scooters. This is daily life: work, shops, errands.
- Getting away. Airports, how far their flights reach, and whether budget airlines fly there.
Each side gets its own score, from 0 to 5. We average the two into one mobility score, but always show the two sides next to each other, so a great airport never hides a hard commute.
Where the numbers come from
The two sides come from different places. Airport connectivity is built from real passenger data (Eurostat and OurAirports); read airport connectivity for the detail. The everyday-transport scores are AI-assisted: a language model reads what's written about each city and rates how easy it is to get around, labelled as an AI signal wherever it appears. Read how that works in AI-assisted analysis.
What it can't tell you
- One score covers two very different things. A high mobility score can come from great flights or great local transport, so check the side you'd actually use.
- It scores a city, not your exact commute or one bus line's reliability.
- It doesn't know fares or crowding. A well-covered network can still be pricey, or packed at rush hour.
- We measure getting around town most accurately in dense, well-mapped cities.
See it live
Every country page has a mobility section that shows getting around town and getting away side by side, ranked city by city. On a country page we weight the cities by how many people live in them, and name the best and worst, because mobility swings more from city to city than almost anything else we measure (see how country verdicts work).
Or look at transit and walkability city by city on the explore map.