BATS YRAM Toolkit showcased at VeloFinland 2024!

The conference, organised this year by the Finnish Cyclists’ Federation and Visit Porvoo, aims to highlight the latest news and innovations related to year-round cycling, city planning and cycling tourism.

VeloFinland brings together decision makers, city planners, civil engineers, service providers, tourism professionals, students and advocates for an extensive program of presentations, workshops, guided cycling tours and more.

BATS was represented at the conference by Miloš Mladenović (Aalto University, Finland), Simo Syrman (City of Porvoo, Finland) and Heike Bunte (Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg – District of Altona, Germany), who jointly coordinated an insightful workshop session designed to bring together diverse practitioners, including planners, for a critical discussion and co-creation of the usefulness of the open-access toolkit developed throughout the BATS project.

The training and toolkits currently used in transport/urban planning practice do not cater for innovative thinking when diagnosing the challenges and barriers to increasing walking and cycling during winter months, nor for iterative approaches to strategy development that should include both technical and organizational changes.

In contrast, the BATS Year-Round Active Mobility toolkit aims to integrate necessary planning aspects, such as diagnostics of issues in a city by focusing on both understanding diverse user mobility experiences and the broader contextual urban system dynamics, or to identify the right intervention points as infrastructural or policy actions, including their timing and responsibility.

The workshop run during the VeloFinland 2024 Conference provided the opportunity for organisers and attendees to critically examine the toolkit modules as well as provide suggestions for complementary additions and improvements. Attendees from across Europe and as far as Canada contributed actively to an impactful workshop, sharing experiences and opinions while providing important feedback on one of the BATS project’s key outputs.

The organiser of the workshop, Professor Miloš Mladenović noted:

“The workshop showed there is a clear need in planning practice for a toolkit that would enable knowledge building and action coordination of different stakeholder responsible for enabling year-round active mobility. Increasing the share of walking and cycling during winter in the Nordics is a clear behaviour change problem, which needs many hands to make it happen – from urban planners and winter maintenance engineers to healthcare and education professionals.”

Reflecting on the workshop, project coordinator Heike Bunte commented:

“In fact, the workshop already showed that the toolkit helps to bridge knowledge gaps for different professions. Bridging knowledge, plus enabling cities to reflect with this toolkit on current practices will be a key opener to prioritise active mobility, especially under severe weather conditions.”

Representing the host city of Porvoo, Simo Syrman added:

“Although VeloFinland took place in early autumn weather, Porvoo experiences both snowy and icy conditions throughout the winter, which poses a challenge for year-round active mobility. As a BATS partner city, we are currently improving our winter maintenance and also helping in testing and developing the toolkit further. Both processes are in early phases, but the toolkit has already been useful in distinguishing different target groups and mapping out crucial dependencies and potentials for cooperation. No tool is a silver bullet, but for cities committed to developing their planning processes, the BATS YRAM toolkit offers a pathway towards a more inclusive, and thus more impactful approach.”

As the BATS project continues to develop and test innovative solutions to boost year-round active mobility, follow the project LinkedIn page to keep up to date with the latest news, events and progress!

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