Active Mobility Guidance from Healthy Stadia

Promoting Walking and Cycling to Sports Venues: Active Mobility Guidance from Healthy Stadia

What is Active Mobility?

Active mobility involves travelling from one place to another by physically active means. The two most common forms of active mobility are walking and cycling. Whilst there are many similarities between walking and cycling in terms of what they can achieve, they are often used for different purposes and have quite different infrastructure requirements.

Sports stadia should consider promoting active mobility as part of their matchday transportation strategy as walking and cycling have great potential for improving access to your stadia.

Why encourage fans to walk and cycle to venues?

Given that transport plays such an essential role in the matchday experience of fans, staff, and volunteers, it is important to ensure that everyone has efficient and cost-effective means to access sports stadia.

Walking and cycling can improve public health by increasing levels of physical activity and reducing rates of non-communicable diseases, whilst also cutting congestion and carbon emissions and improving air quality.

Promoting active mobility to sports stadia therefore provides a combination of health, environmental and logistical benefits to sports stadia and stadium users whilst also helping to support the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Active Mobility Guidance

Healthy Stadia’s active mobility guidance is designed to support colleagues across Europe in stadium operations, events, transport and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) roles with the knowledge and tools to increase provision for walking and cycling to sports venues.

Building upon the first edition published in 2014, our guidance was updated in 2021 in collaboration with UEFA’s Football and Social Responsibility Unit and the UCI (Union Cycliste Internationale). The guidance document establishes the public health, environmental, and logistical rationales for promoting active mobility, how to take a collaborative approach with key stakeholders, and the infrastructure needed to facilitate walking and cycling for both fans and staff.

The guidance also explores how walking and cycling can work with public transport as part of a comprehensive sustainable transport strategy and provides case studies and monitoring and evaluation tools to assess the impact of engaging in the active mobility agenda.