Smart Dublin’s transformative Active Travel Dashboard project won this year’s prestigious Mobility Award at the Smart City Awards, placing Dublin firmly on the map as a hub for smart urban planning. The project has rapidly become a model for user-led, data-driven solutions, employs real-time information to enhance active travel infrastructure, including cycling and walking routes, across the Irish capital.
The Active Travel Dashboard serves as a “one-stop-shop” for understanding and analysing patterns of walking and cycling across Dublin. By aggregating data from multiple sources—including census data, commuting figures, Google EIE trips data, and EcoCounter sensors—the dashboard offers a detailed and accurate picture of active travel in the city. It also overlays this information onto existing active travel infrastructure, helping to visualise where people are cycling and walking and how that usage correlates with the city’s network of routes.
Designed to promote healthier and more sustainable transport choices, the Active Travel Dashboard aggregates data, giving both policymakers and the public easy access to insights on pedestrian and cyclist movements throughout the city. The dashboard offers the region the potential to optimise city planning by using data to inform decision-making and ultimately enhance the safety of our active travel infrastructure.
The project emerged from an active travel and data workshop in February 2024, which highlighted how scattered and underutilised the existing data was. Participants, including academics, the National Transport Authority, Smart Dublin, and local authority active travel teams, identified various data streams—like strava metrics, historical survey information, and Google EIE data-that were often overlooked. The workshop underscored the need for a unified platform that could present this information cohesively and accessibly.
Developed using Mapbox, the dashboard features three core data layers. An overlay feature makes it possible to analyse trends over time and assess the impacts of investment. In recent years, Ireland has invested approximately €365 million annually in active travel. The tool also links this data to a range of metrics, such as annual fuel savings, CO2 reductions, time savings, and premature deaths avoided to demonstrate the substantial benefits of active travel
Smart Dublin Open Data Lead Jack Kavanagh expressed pride in the achievement, stating, “this prestigious award recognising our collaborative efforts to develop innovative solutions for Dublin is very encouraging. Advancing active mobility means shaping a future that is more connected, inclusive, and sustainable. I am inspired to continue this work, knowing that each step brings us closer to real data-driven decision making, improving quality of life and reducing carbon emissions in Dublin”.
With global cities grappling with rising traffic congestion and emissions, Dublin’s Active Travel Dashboard represents how urban centres can leverage technology and data to create more liveable environments, setting a standard for sustainable urban mobility worldwide.