ENHANCE: Enhancing Sustainable Travel in Small Cities and Outer Metropolitan Areas

The concept of the 15-minute city was developed for inner city districts in major metropolitan centres, but it is also highly relevant to outer metropolitan areas and smaller towns and cities to foster more sustainable travel behaviour. Yet, the latter areas often have additional sustainability challenges including greater car dependence, struggling local retail centres, disintegrated housing developments and weaker active travel infrastructure. The ENHANCE project is designed to understand the barriers for the application of 15mC principles in outer metropolitan areas and small cities and provide evidence to improve local planning decision-making. This will be achieved through three main tasks:
1. Creating multi-modal composite accessibility indicators that capture progress towards 15-minute city goals and that highlight the degree to which daily travel needs can potentially be fulfilled within local trips.
2. Analysing actual travel behaviour in relation to the 15-minute city objectives to describe the degree to which different societal groups fulfil their daily travel needs by local trips in practice and to understand current barriers to meeting sustainable travel objectives.
3. Develop a modelling environment that allows the development of future scenarios that enhance accessibility by the provision of transport infrastructure, adapting travel behaviour or (re)developing the city.