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Well as others have said, Chicago is far larger in area.
There are a lot of places on the southwest and northwest side of Chicago that are going to have a lot less random foot traffic than the compact city of San Fran.
If you carve out a similar 48 square miles from the South Loop, up to the North Side of the city and over west a few miles - I believe it's something like 22,000 people per square mile. That area is going to have the highest degree of foot traffic.
The Chicago loop has around 750,000 people on an average workday between office workers, the 80,000 university/college students/staff, retail workers, visitors, etc. Throw in the attached North Michigan Ave areas and it's around 1,000,000 people per day. Obviously most of those don't drive as there's not enough road space. The L radiates from the loop with around 600,000 passengers a day, and Metra radiates as well with around 330,000 passengers. Of course not all of those people are going downtown, but a great many are. I work downtown, and when I walk the area during the day I'm still amazed at the sheer number of people smashed into that small area.
I too would have to agree with the above. The question to this thread was which has 'more' people on the streets in 'total sum' not about tourists or what block area has more density. New Orleans can have a lot of tourists during the Madi Gras week in the dense packed French Quarter but it doesn't happen everyday. You would have to include everything in the city. Chicago actually overlaps San Francisco by many more square miles of population and a network of street lined sidewalks. Chicago also having the 2nd largest public transit system in the entire country you would have to have 'more' people on the city streets to use it. The daily ridership usage numbers speak larger volumes. You could actually fit SF inside Chicago along with a few more cities to boot. Philadelphia would be a more fair comparison to SF in this regard.
^ you could actually fit almost 5 San Fran's in Chicago's footprint. Chicago has a LOT of vacant land down on the south side though that's never been developed, and O'hare which is many square miles though.
I think they're just two different places. San Fran is easily my second favorite place in the country after Chicago. San Fran is smaller, but has a really awesome pedestrian culture. Chicago does in areas, but in the end they're just differnet places. Chicago has a ton of outlying neighborhoods where you're going to have quite a bit less foot traffic than in San Fran.
Honestly, does it even matter? Both cities have a lot of foot traffic, enough said.
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