EX: NYC has 8.5 million people who probably average 50+ flights a day in elevators. People may travel up and down stairs more frequently, but few people are traveling anywhere near that far.
This is hard to believe
If they enter and leave 1 building once per day that's ~38 floors, double again for leaving home to get to work ~= 76 floors. Many people like the homeless or shut ins average less, but someone that is doing delivery's could easily average 1,000+ floors per day.
I could see the overall average easily being 100+ floors, but 50 seems like a very safe bet.
While it seemed high, if you have a 1 floor building, and a 10 floor building you have floors ((1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 7 + 8 + 9 +10) + (1)) / 11 = 5 floor average height.
Not: Average the building heights (10 + 1) / 2 = 5.5 and then cut that in half = 2.75 average floor height.
PS: Put another way a 1 story building has 1 floor of people a 100 floor building has 100 floors of people so the average person is not evenly split between both buildings. So, 100 1 story buildings and 1 100 story building average to 50 floors. (+/- and off by 1 errors as you go up 99 floors to reach 100th floor, but people also go to basements.)
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-tall-apple-number-o...
I bet there's datasets for this actually.
Also that doesn't count all the stairs subway riders use which I'd imagine would be a huge portion of stairs walked in NYC daily.