The EGU General Assembly is the annual flagship conference of the European Geosciences Union (EGU), bringing together scientists from around the world to share and discuss research across all areas of the Earth, planetary, and space sciences. This year, the conference will take place from 27 April to 2 May 2025 in Vienna, Austria. Our colleagues will present a paper on hiWalk and hiBike, co-created assessment tools designed to foster active mobility for all, as well as a poster on high-resolution, bottom-up greenhouse gas (GHG) emission inventories using open data.
hiWalk and hiBike – active mobility indices as tool to facilitate systemic traffic transition in cities
Presentation: Wednesday, 30 Apr, 11:20–11:30 (CEST), Room -2.33
Achieving climate neutrality requires a socio-ecological transformation of the mobility sector. Consequently, urban traffic infrastructure must be redesigned to promote and support active mobility. By analysing multiple criteria extracted from open-access geodata via OSM (OpenStreetMap), we can assess the current state of the urban traffic infrastructure and evaluate the walkability and bikeability of streets and neighborhoods. HeiGIT’s walkability and bikeability indices – hiWalk and hiBike – provide traffic planners, decision-makers, NGOs, and the general public with quantitative insights into how well a city’s traffic infrastructure supports active mobility.
Our indices address two critical gaps: (a) providing detailed information on the suitability of urban environments for active mobility, and (b) ensuring that traffic infrastructure transformation is inclusive. To meet these needs, we collaborate with practitioners and NGOs to co-create street-level indices of walkability (hiWalk) and bikeability (hiBike). Our goal is to offer practical applications that go beyond general index values for cities or neighborhoods. By assessing bikeability and walkability at the street-level, we can better inform routing engines and support accessibility analyses of inclusive “15-minute cities“.
hiWalk and hiBike consist of indicators that assess the user-friendliness, attractiveness, and safety of paths and streets. They evaluate factors such as the presence of sidewalks and cycling lanes, surface smoothness, and surface material types. hiBike also incorporates information on street-side parking from OSM to identify streets where cyclists may be at risk of “dooring”. Both indices are entirely based on open data and can be adapted to various urban settings worldwide.
The presentation will focus on the main challenges we have encountered, including (1) their application for cities with different cultural, socioeconomic, and environmental contexts, and (2) the variability in the quality and completeness of OSM data. These challenges underscore the benefits of our co-creation approach in enhancing the indices’ usability and impact on policy.
A scalable approach to high-resolution, bottom-up GHG emission inventories using open data
Poster: Wednesday, 30 Apr, 16:15–18:00 (CEST), at Hall X5, X5.88
Targeting and tracking climate change mitigation efforts requires accurate bottom-up inventories of GHG emissions, verified by independent atmospheric measurements. Here we present a simple approach to develop bottom-up inventories of carbon dioxide emissions from road traffic (at street level) and residential space heating (in a 100-m grid) using crowd-sourced data from OpenStreetMap and other publicly available data sources. Our approach can be easily scaled to all of Germany and, with some modifications, can be tailored to a wide range of contexts and applications. We demonstrate the approach for the cities of Mannheim and Heidelberg, in the Rhine-Neckar Metropolitan Area in Germany.
Emissions from road traffic are derived from multiplying estimates of average daily traffic volume – based on road type information, number of lanes, and population density – by speed- and fuel-dependent emission factors and data about the national vehicle fleet composition. Space heating emissions rely primarily on gridded data from the 2022 German census on population density, living space per capita, heating energy carriers, and building age.
We validate our traffic volume estimates with independent traffic count data and compare our emission estimates to available inventories. Road traffic emissions in the Rhine-Neckar region were 1.6% higher than TNO estimates for the region (Super et al. 2021), a widely used inventory of disaggregated emission in Europe. Our residential space heating emissions estimates were slightly lower than estimates from emissions inventories for the cities of Mannheim and Heidelberg (12% and 8%, respectively), largely attributable to the type of emission factors used in the calculations.
How to cite: Block, S., Ulrich, V., Martin, M., von Elverfeldt, K., Murai von Buenau, K., Haas, P., Maiwald, R., Butz, A., and Vardag, S. N.: A scalable approach to high-resolution, bottom-up GHG emission inventories using open data, EGU General Assembly 2025, Vienna, Austria, 27 Apr–2 May 2025, EGU25-17019, Abstract EGU25-17019 , 2025.
