On a typical day in the Irish city of Dublin, residents make around 220,000 return trips by walking and cycling. The national government is investing heavily in active travel,a and public investment of this scale has afforded an opportunity for local authorities to implement significant shifts in transport systems across cities and towns in Ireland. Aligned with the National Sustainable Mobility Policy, Dublin City Council aims to put 95% of Dubliners within a 5-minute walk of a safe route for active travel.
However, measuring the impact of investments thus far has been a challenge due to patchy and scattered data. The use of technology for data collection has often been an afterthought, which means that cities find it difficult to assess and communicate the effect of these projects.
To address this issue, in March 2024 Dublin City Council launched its 'Data Insights for Active Travel' project, with support from the Partnership for Healthy Cities. The project aims to pilot new technologies and community engagement for evaluating the impact of the city’s active travel investments. It connects a range of public sector partners, and its objective is to replace an ad-hoc approach to data collection with a systematic and integrated process. It also aligns local and national sustainable mobility strategies with WHO-recommended interventions to increase physical activity, strengthening policies and practice connected to safe walking and cycling.
The project began by bringing partners together and identifying priority indicators, to inform data needs. A combination of baseline and outcome indicators were selected, and approaches that could capture the data were chosen. These included the city’s first ever use of AI roadside sensors, as well as smart bike lights and an AI safety assessment tool.
Work has led to the creation of the Dublin Active Travel Dashboard, which combines data to correlate active travel patterns with infrastructure use, public health projections, climate impacts and estimated financial savings. The dashboard also applies the WHO Health Economic Assessment Tool (HEAT) for walking and cycling to model projected health and environmental impacts for different parts of the city. The city has also successfully set up a new structure of local, regional and national partners, created a new data infrastructure measuring the impact of active travel investments, and provided new opportunities for community engagement and feedback.
Dublin’s experience shows how collaborative data ecosystems are key to turning infrastructure investments into better health and safer streets for all road users. The project has already won international recognition, taking home the prestigious Mobility Award at the 2024 Smart City Expo World Congress in Barcelona. Closer to home, the project model has also attracted interest from other Irish municipalities. As Dublin’s work progresses, the city will continue to show how collective action on data can underpin more effective evaluation and decision-making, contributing to healthier, more inclusive and more sustainable cities.
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a Walking, wheeling, cycling and scooting