Support study on data collection and analysis of active modes use and infrastructure in Europe

The study addresses the lack of comparable statistics concerning walking and cycling in the EU. Travel surveys are the main source of statistics on average daily walking and cycling distance and number of trips per person. Countries were divided in seven groups according to the data collection and reporting methods used. The most recent and representative statistics were used to produce a first comparative overview on walking and cycling use based on these non-harmonised statistics. The European median daily walking and cycling distances and number of trips were estimated. The results were compared with statistics derived from EU surveys. The potential of using crowdsourcing for data collection of infrastructure was examined and results were promising for collecting cycling infrastructure statistics. This would require standard definitions and guidelines for the data collection. The potential of big data was analysed through the case studies of ‘Google Better Cities’ and ‘COWI City Sense’. Although promising for the future, neither of these could provide active modes statistics. Recommendations to further improve information and statistics on active modes include: common definitions, new indicators concerning walking friendliness of urban environments, alignment of data collection efforts with ongoing and future initiatives and post-processing methods to improve comparability.nrpages: 144status: publishe