How digital mobility analytics can improve the appeal of active travel

Enabling more people to walk will support ambitions to reduce the amount of traffic in the city, providing air and noise quality improvements and making the city centre a safer environment for people to move around in. These environmental benefits will benefit specific groups in particular such as children and older people, making the city centre a more equitable and inclusive space.

Of course, to achieve this increase in walking and wheeling will require targeted and transformational improvements to the city centre walking network.

We were commissioned by Manchester City Council (MCC) to review the city centre walking network and develop a prioritised schedule of small-scale improvements. This includes the ensuring walkable connections between key attractions, reducing street clutter, providing crossings and junctions, and ensuring areas are safe and attractive during day and night.

The study area for the project covered the entire city centre of Manchester. On a tight programme, MCC needed a fast and efficient method to understand the locations that improvements would provide the most impact. To identify which improvements were needed where, it was first vital to understand how people currently moved around the city. 

Tool

Staterra

We used Staterra toolkit, our new digital toolkit to better understand pedestrian mobility and travel demand in cities and public realm. The tool draws on open source public mobility data, enabling us to review a large study area in a few short days and prioritise improvements based on key journey metrics and walkability analysis. Stakeholder engagement was central to the study, helping to make sure that there is both local and wider stakeholder buy-in to the proposals coming forward.