• Background

  Walking is essential for environmentally friendly transport and mobility solutions, and is usually a part of trips taken on public transport. Encouraging people to walk more is thus central to achieving national and international climate and environmental goals to reduce car dependence, air pollution and urban traffic volume, and to improve public health and create vibrant, attractive and inclusive cities.

  Small Norwegian towns are often characterized by short distances to the city centre. This represents a great potential for more walking. Nevertheless, the car still dominates in everyday travel. Land use and transport planning and development, from the city to the design of pavements and walkways, play an important role in ensuring good conditions for pedestrians. These factors are important to make walking a more attractive option and able to compete with other modes of transport.

  There is currently a knowledge gap regarding how to best plan urban areas for walking, how urban environments affect walking behaviour, and how small and large measures can make walking a more attractive option.

  This knowledge gap hinders the ability to increase the amount of walking in cities through land and transport planning and development. A further hindrance is that small cities often have limited administrative and financial resources. An important aspect in the project is therefore to explore what is good enough when it comes to methods, tools and measures in this context.

• Goals

  The overall objective of WALKMORE is to address the question:
  How can small cities be planned and developed to encourage people to walk more?
  
  This is explored through several work packages that look at planning processes, experience of urban environments, tools for mapping and evaluating walkability, low-budget pilots to make walking more attractive, and cooperation between actors in urban planning and development, from strategic to operational levels.

  The project investigates how small cities can be developed through land use and transport planning to promote and stimulate more walking in everyday life.
  
  The goal is to produce new knowledge on:
  i) planning processes and practices for walking
  ii) tools and methods for mapping and evaluating walking and walkability
  iii) how people perceive walkability in their built environment, especially in small cities.
  
  This will strengthen cities' ability to plan and develop their land and transport systems in ways that encourage people to walk more.

• More about the project

  WALKMORE is a collaborative project between Narvik Municipality and the County of Nordland, Steinkjer Municipality and the County of Trøndelag, Kongsvinger Municipality and the County of Innlandet, the Norwegian Public Roads Administration, the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU) and the Institute of Transport Economics (TØI).

Participants

External partners:

TØI Project homepage