Paths of least resistance: what we took away from AWCC 2026

"Prevention better than cure."

That's the motto on a plaque on the wall of the Adabco boutique hotel, where I stayed in Adelaide. The historic building was once the Our Boys Institute, opened in the 1890s to give young people a place to stay active and healthy. Its founders saw it as a long-term investment: far cheaper to help people thrive early than to deal with the consequences later.

It felt like a fitting start to the Australian Walking and Cycling Conference (AWCC 2026). The conference was held in another of Adelaide's historic buildings, the Exchange, on 15–16 October. This year's theme was the "path of least resistance": how do we make walking and cycling the easiest, most natural choice for everyday trips?

Around 50 presenters, from council officers and engineers to researchers and advocates, tackled that question from every angle. Here's what stood out for me.

We know what to build. The hard part is proving it.

One message came through again and again over the two days. Australia broadly knows what good walking and cycling infrastructure looks like. Safe, separated, connected networks work.

Clover Moore and Fiona Campbell showed this with Sydney's story. Over six terms, the city has built out a separated cycleway network, and cycling on some routes has almost tripled. As the Lord Mayor put it, change happens metre by metre and street by street. Once the pieces join up, it suddenly feels possible.

But Sydney's journey also showed how fragile progress can be. One cycleway was built, removed and rebuilt, at a cost of millions each time. Meanwhile, only around 1% of federal transport funding goes to active transport.

So the real challenge for most councils isn't knowing what to build. It's proving where to invest limited budgets, showing what changed afterwards, and keeping public support along the way. That takes evidence.

Four themes that stood out

1. Baseline data is the missing piece

You can't evaluate a project if you don't know how many people were riding before it. Yet this was one of the most common gaps raised at the conference.

Elliott Fishman from the Institute for Sensible Transport showed how much work it currently takes to fill it. His team stitches together a handful of fixed bike counters with fitness-app data, then uses regression to estimate riders on every other street. He was candid that it's an approximation. Counters only see the spots where they're installed, and fitness-app data leans towards sport and recreational riders rather than everyday trips. Access to that data was also raised as a challenge.

The stakes are high. His analysis found that roughly 80% of crashes happen on 20% of streets, but turning crash counts into real risk depends on knowing how much riding happens on each street. Without reliable, network-wide data from everyday riders, councils are making investment decisions on estimates.

Researchers are working on the same problem from other angles. RMIT's Afshin Jafari showed a cloud-based tool that estimates mode shift, exposure and cost-benefit for proposed bike lanes. Its biggest constraint is input data: travel surveys, small samples and assumed traffic volumes.

2. Community evidence protects projects

Prue Oswin shared the story of a raised crossing near a school. A community survey and heat map confirmed what parents were worried about, and that evidence got the crossing built. Her point: when the community asked for it, rather than the institution proposing it, the project is far harder to unpick.

She also noted that councils already hold huge volumes of customer requests, but rarely in a form that shows where people need to walk and ride safely. As she put it, if people can't manage the last 20 metres, they can't walk the 400.

3. Information alone doesn't change behaviour

Professor Ian Walker from Swansea University gave one of the most thought-provoking keynotes. His message was that most travel is driven by habit and environment, not information. One of the best predictors of whether someone walks is simply whether there's a footpath.

Two ideas stuck with me. First, timing matters: moving house opens a short window when people rethink everyday habits. Second, people consistently underestimate how much others support change. Showing real numbers on who is already walking and riding can shift the conversation.

4. E-bikes and e-scooters need better data, not just headlines

RAA shared findings from its survey of South Australians on e-scooters and e-bikes. Legal pedal-assist e-bikes generally work well, but imported high-powered devices are driving tighter rules and negative media coverage. RAA called for a proper crash data collection framework, so policy can respond to evidence rather than headlines.

What this means for cities

Put those themes together and a clear picture emerges. Councils need evidence that is continuous, street-level and grounded in real journeys. They need it to set priorities, to evaluate what they build, and to defend good projects when opposition comes.

They don't need more raw data to wade through. One speaker made the point that councils often don't know what to do with data. What helps is clear answers: where people ride, where it feels unsafe, and what changed after an intervention.

That's the gap we're focused on at See.Sense. We turn everyday rides into anonymised insights that help cities see how their networks are really used. Working with cities from Sydney and Melbourne to Helsinki, we've seen how much easier these conversations become when the evidence is on the table.

In Australia, we can now go a step further. Through our company Active Travel Insights, we're the exclusive Australian partner for Eco-Counter, a leading provider of walking and cycling counters. That means councils and agencies can get a full range of people and cycling counting solutions alongside See.Sense insight data, from one team.

It's exactly the combination several speakers described needing: accurate counts at fixed points, plus journey-level data across the whole network. Together, they give the baseline, the before-and-after evaluation and the reporting that projects need, from deployment through to insight.

The Our Boys Institute's founders had it right in the 1890s. Investing early, and backing it with evidence, is far better than trying to fix the consequences later.

Thank you, Adelaide

A big thank you to the volunteer committee who organised AWCC 2026. Putting together two days and around 50 speakers is no small feat. Thanks too to everyone who took the time to chat between sessions.

If you're working on walking and cycling data in Australia, or anywhere else, I'd love to hear from you. Connect with me on LinkedIn, or for counting and data projects in Australia, email the Active Travel Insights team at hello@activetravelinsights.com.

By Irene McAleese, Co-founder & Chief Commercial Officer, See.Sense