Planned for Everyone, Working for Few: Five Hard Truths About Active Travel in 2026

The five truths draw on recent European research to make a single, pointed argument: if we are serious about the 15-minute city, we must stop treating active travel as a simple good that just needs more encouragement, and start planning it as the complex, multi-modal system it actually is, one that demands precise engineering, genuine governance, and honesty about who our cities are currently designed to serve.

Hard truth 1: The shortest route is not always a route at all

The Silver Ways project analysed over 1,500 real-world walking routes across Mannheim, Uppsala, and Kayseri, comparing where people actually walked against the routes that standard planning models would recommend. 

A preliminary finding was that older adults frequently bypassed the shortest path. Not out of preference, but out of necessity.

Hard truth 2: Building a cycle lane is the easy part

The 15minESTATES project, working across five cities including Delft, Halle, Riga, Budapest and Sofia, is asking whether that trajectory can be reversed, and what it actually takes to make active travel a realistic and attractive choice for people living in these areas. 

It appears that the decision to walk or cycle is shaped by the personal capacity, individual routines and requirements, the availability of safe storage for bikes at home and at destinations, and the degree to which people feel secure in public spaces.

Hard truth 3: What people on the urban fringe need is not more mobility, but more nearby

The DREAMS project challenges the idea that a single 15-minute threshold makes sense for all types of journey. Walking to a green space in 15 minutes is a reasonable ambition. Reaching more specialised services, such as a hospital or a further education college, using active or shared transport is more difficult, and for many fringe residents it remains out of reach regardless of the mobility offer. 

This was the case in Vienna's outer Liesing district, where a mobile community space called the ‘Raum-Wagen’ was used for everything from open-air cinema to community meetings. Results suggest that what some residents need most is not better mobility options but better amenities, closer to home. The project also shows that needs vary considerably from person to person, and that solutions must reflect that diversity. 

Hard truth 4: A street can feel safe and still be impossible to walk

Alongside the Street View analysis, the COLINE project draws on high-resolution mobile phone data to trace how people actually move through neighbourhoods: which amenities they visit, in what sequence, and by what means. 

This combination of perceived environment and real behaviour allows the project to identify not just how streets look, but how they function in practice for different groups, including those who are socially or economically marginalised. 

Hard truth 5: Co-creation is only as good as the power it hands over

Across four cities including Trondheim, Gdańsk, Valencia and Oxford, the Enact 15mC project is testing what genuine co-creation looks like in practice and deliberately reaching out to the people most often left out of participatory processes. 

In Oxford, residents in the Florence Park neighbourhood map where they live, propose ideas, test scenarios using augmented and virtual reality, and collectively build a vision for the future. That vision is then shared more widely through an online model, allowing the broader community to weigh in before recommendations go to the local council.

Yet, participation is not empowerment unless it comes with the power to affect change.