hiWALK and hiBIKE: Co-created Indices to Foster Active Mobility for All

von Elverfeldt, Kirsten and Block, Sebastian and Schott, Moritz and Kemmer, Jonas and Wilke, Emily and Winkler, Benedict and Fallast, Marie-Therese and Udoma-Ejorh, Olamide and Ulrich, Veit and Gatland, Danielle and Martin, Maria and Bayer, Ingolf and Parashar, Satvik and Neumann, Dominik and Hatfield, Charlie and Adamiak, Maciej and Ludwig, Christina and Zipf, Alexander (2025) hiWALK and hiBIKE: Co-created Indices to Foster Active Mobility for All. URBAN INNOVATION: TO BOLDLY GO WHERE NO CITIES HAVE GONE BEFORE. Medium sized cities and towns as a major arena of global urbanisation. Proceedings of REAL CORP 2025, 30th Intl. Conference on Urban Development, Regional Planning and Information Society. pp. 587-597. ISSN 2521-3938

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Abstract

Current accessibility analyses, which underlie the 15-minute city concept, assume that all streets are equally walkable and bikeable for everyone. This assumption implicitly neglects the needs of people with special mobility requirements, i.e. of the old and very young, people with disabilities, and risk-averse bikers. Stakeholders working to improve urban active mobility, e.g., NGOs such as Radlobby Austria or traffic planners such as PLANUM Fallast & Partner, require detailed information on the bikeability and walkability of the urban path network to lobby and/or plan for infrastructure that promotes active mobility and provides inclusive accessibility to essential services. To address this gap, HeiGIT’s climate action team works with practitioners and NGOs to co-create street-level indices of walkability (hiWalk) and bikeability (hiBike) with direct practical applications. Going beyond summary values at the level of cities or neighborhoods, our street-level indicators facilitate integrating bikeability and walkability information into routing engines, thereby supporting accessibility analyses of “15-minute cities for all“. Both hiWalk and hiBike incorporate indicators describing the urban street and path network in terms of user-friendliness, attractiveness, and safety. For example, the indicators identify walkable/bikeable paths and analyse their surface quality in terms of smoothness and type of material. hiBike also includes an indicator of “dooring” risk, based on street-side parking information. Both indices rely on open data sets, mainly OpenStreetMap (OSM), and can be tailored and applied across cities worldwide. Since both hiWALK and hiBIKE are still under development, rather than presenting the indices’ results, this paper will discuss the challenges encountered (1) during their application to starkly differing urban environments worldwide, and (2) due to the variability in OSM’s data quality and completeness across regions. Additionally, we present our co-creation approach and discuss its benefits for index usability and policy impact. Besides continuing to refine the two indices, future research will also focus on assessing whether the results of our analyses align with the perceived walkability and bikeability in different streets, neighbourhoods, and cities. We conclude that several unique features of hiWalk and hiBike distinguish them from existing indices of active mobility. hiWalk and hiBike prioritise accessibility for all, explicitly considering users with special mobility needs. Moreover, through our plan to integrate our indicators into OpenRouteService (ORS), the mobility needs of the most vulnerable will be effectively captured in accessibility analyses and routing decisions. Finally, and most importantly, our co-creation approach renders feedback from stakeholders during the development process, which ensures the relevance and usability of the indicators in real-world urban planning and advocacy applications.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	open data, 15-minute city, biking, walking, planning
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HE Transportation and Communications H Social Sciences > HM Sociology
Depositing User:	The CORP Team
Date Deposited:	25 May 2025 16:07
Last Modified:	07 Jul 2025 11:08
URI:	http://repository.corp.at/id/eprint/1238

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