Youth-focused mobility audit
A modular, georeferenced audit co-produced with young people — assessing functionality, safety, comfort, intermodality and inclusion, and distilled into a Youth Mobility Stress Index.
A youth-centred look at the street
The mobility audit is a youth-centred field-and-desk assessment of the functional quality, accessibility and perceived safety of local mobility systems in the three Living Lab cities — Nyíregyháza, Bram and Oradea. It systematically links spatial indicators, micro-scale observations and young people's own perceptions to inform the design and testing of solutions, and delivers a transferable protocol that other cities can reuse.
What the audit sets out to do
- Assess how well current networks support everyday youth trips — to school, leisure and part-time work — for access, safety, comfort and inclusion.
- Identify and geolocate micro-scale barriers: unsafe crossings, poor lighting, discontinuous cycle paths, hostile waiting areas.
- Map intermodality challenges, especially first/last-mile issues and transfers between walking, cycling, micromobility and public transport.
- Integrate the objective audit with youth perception data and the CIM to set evidence-based intervention priorities.
A mixed-methods framework
The framework takes a multi-dimensional view of the mobility experience — physical (infrastructure), psychological (fear, stress, autonomy) and social (belonging, peer norms). It combines quantitative tools (structured audits, spatial indicators and CIM-based measures) with qualitative ones (focus groups, walk-along interviews, participatory mapping and photo-documentation). A common core protocol keeps results comparable across cities while allowing each Living Lab to adapt to its own context. Each lab selects one to three pilot areas — school environments and home–school routes, residential quarters with high youth populations, and "youth anchors" such as sports facilities, parks and transport nodes.
Five indicator domains
The audit tool is modular and georeferenced, designed for use on a phone or tablet, with wording adapted for young people. Each item uses a 1–5 rating, and a dedicated section captures the youth co-auditor's personal sense of safety.
Network functionality
Sidewalk width and quality, curb heights, crossing distances, step-free access to stations.
Safety & security
Traffic speed, driver behaviour, lighting, and perceived risk of harassment or bullying.
Comfort & amenity
Weather protection, seating, greenery, and the legibility of wayfinding.
Intermodality
Transfer complexity, secure bike parking at stops, and schedules aligned with school activities.
Inclusion
Suitability for diverse groups and the "welcome" factor of public spaces.
The Youth Mobility Stress Index
Audit scores are triangulated with perception data and fed back into the CIM as layered maps of infrastructure quality and accessibility. By comparing objective scores with how places actually feel, the project pinpoints mismatch locations — streets that look functional on paper yet are experienced as unwelcoming — and distils them into a Youth Mobility Stress Index that guides design decisions.
Co-produced with young people
Fieldwork is co-produced, not a top-down inspection. Young people are recruited and trained as Mobility Ambassadors; small mixed groups of researchers and youth carry out walk-along audits together; "stop and talk" prompts capture spontaneous reactions on the route; and reflection workshops validate findings and prioritise the top intervention ideas. Youth-specific perception surveys — getting to school, getting to leisure places, and moving around the home area — complete the picture, with all youth inputs handled anonymously.
Source: NextGenMobility Mobility Audits (draft), led by TU Wien.