A BATS Eye View! Three Years of Collaboration on Year-Round Active Mobility Draws to a Close

Wow, what a journey it has been for the BATS project!

In November 2023, a new idea took flight: 12 organisations from seven Baltic Sea Region countries gathered in Hamburg’s borough of Altona to start working out how cities can make walking and cycling safer, more attractive and more accessible throughout the year, including during the darker, colder months when active mobility becomes more challenging.

As part of the kick-off in Hamburg’s borough of Altona, all partners headed out in small groups for a “quick scan” of the area around the meeting venue, identifying the strengths and shortcomings of the local environment for year-round walking and cycling. It was a practical introduction to the challenge ahead. Over the following years, including two winter seasons of testing, partners would work towards a shared understanding of Year-Round Active Mobility (YRAM), exchange experiences across the Baltic Sea Region and develop tools to turn that ambition into everyday practice.

As the project comes to a close, we believe we have reached that now. BATS leaves behind a set of transnationally developed, practical, and transferable tools to help public authorities build the organisational knowledge, collaboration and citizen engagement needed to make year-round active mobility part of how cities plan, maintain and manage their streets.

A story about YRAM organisational culture

At its heart, BATS has been a project about governance and organisational culture.

Improving a particular cycle path or clearing a pavement of snow can make a real difference, but lasting progress also depends on how municipalities work, how they set priorities, what they monitor and how they involve the people who use their streets.

BATS therefore focused on helping public authorities identify the barriers and opportunities within their own organisations, build on existing momentum and make YRAM a more integral part of strategic and operational planning.

The result is the YRAM Toolbox, a set of resources designed to help planners move from identifying a problem to selecting, implementing and monitoring appropriate interventions. Rather than prescribing a single solution for every street, the tools guide users through the process of understanding their local context, defining ambitions and considering the needs of the people they want to reach.

Three complementary resources form the core of the toolbox.

Finding the right interventions for each context

The YRAM Diagnostics and Interventions Toolkit provides a structured way for planners to identify challenges and select appropriate solutions. Its workshop canvases help bring the right questions into the discussion, connect identified problems with local ambitions and support decisions about which interventions are worth pursuing.

The approach recognises that there is no universal solution to year-round active mobility. What works in one municipality may need to be adapted in another, depending on local conditions, priorities and the people who use the streets.

Expanding on the benefits of effective monitoring

The YRAM Monitoring Guidance provides a transferable set of indicators to help municipalities assess the effectiveness of their interventions.

Monitoring is essential, but it can easily become an additional burden for public authorities with limited time and resources. The guidance helps planners identify what is useful to measure and how to make sense of the results, without making monitoring unnecessarily complicated.

Appreciating the importance of knowing what your people want and engaging them accordingly

The Citizen Activation Guide helps planners better understand the residents they want to reach and identify practical ways to encourage more walking and cycling throughout the year.

Alongside guidance on understanding different groups of residents, the resource includes accessible approaches such as surveys, event planning and nudging mechanisms. These can help municipalities move beyond infrastructure alone and consider how to make active mobility a more appealing everyday choice.

Transnational thematic learnings at the heart of BATS

Together, the three resources cover complementary parts of the same process: understanding the challenge, choosing an intervention, involving people and learning from the monitored results. Public authority partners tested the tools in their own contexts, providing feedback that helped refine them while using them to support real-life YRAM interventions. This exchange between knowledge partners and practitioners has been central to the BATS approach.

“BATS municipalities vary significantly in their weather conditions, such as snowfall volume and daylight duration, as well as in their mobility systems and institutional planning cultures. Exchanging across diverse partners helped validate the requirements and usability…”

– Dr Jacek Oskarbski

From shared knowledge to local action

Beyond the development of the toolbox, BATS created opportunities for partners to learn from one another and adapt practices to their own circumstances. Across infrastructure, maintenance, traffic management and citizen activation, the project demonstrated how relatively targeted interventions can help address some of the barriers to walking and cycling throughout the year.

Maintenance: keeping routes attractive when conditions change

A cycling network that works in summer but becomes difficult to use in winter cannot fully support year-round active mobility. Keeping routes clear, safe and accessible requires more than good intentions; it depends on the practical arrangements that municipalities put in place.

Partners exchanged experiences on winter maintenance, highlighting the importance of well-designed contracts and procurement requirements that account for the needs of pedestrians and cyclists throughout the year.

They also recognised that maintenance operations need to be accompanied by efforts to build a stronger culture of active mobility, both among residents and within municipal administrations.

Two examples illustrate how these efforts can work together.

In Umeå, Sweden, and Porvoo, Finland, partners introduced different versions of a winter agents programme, giving residents an active role in winter operations by providing feedback on local conditions. As well as helping municipalities understand how their routes perform in practice, these initiatives encouraged citizens to pay closer attention to the possibilities for walking and cycling during winter.

Other activities focused on making winter cycling more accessible and appealing. Umeå explored an e-bike loan scheme, giving people the opportunity to experience the benefits of electric cycling. In Kiili, Estonia, a winter tyre installation workshop helped prepare pupils’ bicycles for use during snowy conditions.

Supported by the BATS Toolbox, these activities addressed different barriers to winter cycling, from confidence and equipment to awareness and everyday habits. They also showed how citizen activation can complement the physical provision and maintenance of infrastructure.

Traffic management: ensuring routes are visible in all conditions

Road markings can become difficult to see when covered by snow or fallen leaves, while paint can wear away over time. To address this challenge, partners in Klaipėda, Umeå and Hamburg-Altona drew inspiration from a practice in Oulu, Finland: using projectors to display signs or markings for pedestrians and cyclists directly onto the ground.

Each municipality adapted the idea to its own needs.

• In Klaipėda, the aim was to make cycling paths more visible to bus and car drivers. The projectors also drew wider attention to the issue. When snow covered the cycling path, the projected markings made the route more visible, prompting residents to raise concerns on social media about the snow-covered path itself.
• In Umeå, projectors were tested to help pedestrians and cyclists identify where they should walk or ride, particularly on snow-covered streets. The Citizen Activation Guide helped shape a satisfaction survey, with results showing that a majority of respondents found the projectors useful.
• Hamburg-Altona took a different approach, focusing on perceived safety in dark spaces such as tunnels. Rather than using projections solely to direct movement, the city explored inspirational messages that could offer pedestrians a positive distraction and help make the experience of passing through these areas feel less intimidating

Although the interventions differed, the underlying approach was the same: identify a specific local challenge, consider the needs of the people affected, test a suitable response and assess how well it works.

Citizen activation: starting with future generations

Building a year-round active mobility culture also means making walking and cycling familiar habits from an early age.

In Gdynia, Poland, and Kiili, Estonia, partners developed dedicated campaigns encouraging children and young people to walk and cycle to school during autumn and winter. Working with support from BATS partner HOL and drawing on the Citizen Activation Guide, both municipalities developed activities that extended beyond one-off events, helping keep active mobility on the agenda over several months.

Monitoring these activities did not need to be complicated. With support from the YRAM Monitoring Guidance, partners identified accessible indicators, such as counting bicycles in school parking areas and recording the temperature on the day.

This made it possible to track activity without relying on complex data collection or specialist staff. It also showed how the BATS tools could support initiatives in everyday settings, where time and resources are often limited.

By focusing on schools, these activities brought the benefits of year-round active mobility to a younger audience while giving municipalities practical experience in combining citizen engagement with straightforward monitoring.

Infrastructure: looking beyond the obvious safety challenges

Winter conditions can make cycling and walking more hazardous, but some risks remain poorly understood or underreported. Discussions highlighted a not-so-obvious but very important issue: perceived safety (in darkness). A street may meet technical safety requirements and still feel uncomfortable or intimidating. For some population segments, poorly lit paths, tunnels or unclear routes can be enough to discourage walking and cycling altogether.

BATS partners therefore explored ways to make public spaces feel more welcoming, including better route guidance through lighting (Kalundborg) and the use of positive visual distractions in tunnels (Hamburg-Altona). The YRAM Diagnostics and Interventions Toolkit helped structure the process of identifying these challenges and considering suitable responses.

Pedestrian and/or cyclist single crashes was also a hot topic for YRAM: these can occur when cyclists slip on wet, icy or otherwise slippery paths, without involving another road user. These incidents underline the importance of infrastructure that protects users and remains suitable for different weather conditions.

Through a dedicated exchange on protective and reflective elements, partners shared experiences and explored how approaches could be transferred between cities. Kalundborg, for example, learned from Hamburg-Altona’s long-term ambitions in cycling safety.

From local action to a transnational YRAM Toolbox

Across the Baltic Sea Region, the challenges of year-round active mobility are shaped by different climates, street layouts, travel habits and administrative contexts. Throughout the project, BATS partners repeatedly encountered similar questions: how can cities keep routes usable in winter? How can they make walking and cycling feel safer after dark? How can they understand whether an intervention is working? And how can they encourage residents to keep moving when conditions become less favourable?

The project has shown the value of tackling these questions together. By combining the expertise of knowledge partners with the practical experience of public authorities, BATS developed and tested a toolbox that can be adapted to different municipal contexts. The tools were strengthened through real-world application, while the local activities gave partners opportunities to put shared learning into practice.

The resulting YRAM Toolbox is intended to help municipalities across the Baltic Sea Region and beyond kick-start or accelerate their own efforts to make active mobility a more consistent part of everyday life.

Making every season count

When BATS began, year-round active mobility meant something slightly different to each partner. Three years on, it is a shared ambition, shaped by 12 organisations that learned from one another and questioned their own assumptions along the way.

If there is one lesson, it is that progress rarely comes from a single fix. It comes from understanding the local context, involving the people who use the streets and checking what works. That thinking runs through the multiple tools that constitute the YRAM Toolbox.

BATS leaves municipalities with practical resources to turn YRAM ambition into action, helping make active mobility a realistic choice on as many days of the year as possible, across all seasons and daylight levels.

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