Week Without Driving challenges people to go one week without driving to learn firsthand about the barriers people face outside of a car. Taking the bus, walking and biking, or paying for rideshare shows the hidden costs of car-centric infrastructure, which Week Without Driving shines a light on. The 2025 challenge takes place September 29 to October 5.

SGA’s new blog series on examining our built environment shows how you can use walk audits, bike audits, and accessibility audits as tools to keep advocating for these necessary changes, during Week Without Driving and beyond.

Nothing quite beats a walk outside, so it’s not surprising a walk audit is such a useful tool in advocating for change in your community. A walk audit is an organized site visit, where community members, city staff, elected officials, and others walk through an area in need of change together. The group can discuss safety, access, and comfort challenges at the site, including what the participants feel themselves, what they observe of others, and what community members share about their everyday experiences. A walk audit can also be used as a data collection strategy, to record the conditions at a site that may not be obvious, or even available, from existing digital records.

Many benefits of walking together

Bringing people together to walk through these challenges, to experience them first-hand, can have lasting benefits, particularly when community members and decision-makers are in conversation together. Organizing a walk through an area in need of pedestrian improvements can give people:

• On-the-ground perspective: The way our existing infrastructure prioritizes cars may be hard to see from behind the windshield or from looking at a map, but walking on a narrow sidewalk next to a fast lane can quickly reveal the street’s inadequacies. The walk can turn data into a tangible experience for participants: it’s one thing to know on paper that a neighborhood is hotter than others on average, but it’s a completely different thing to stand together at an uncovered bus stop at mid-day.
• Insight into the barriers others face: Even someone who regularly walks is limited to their own experience outside of a car. Inviting people with diverse needs, such as parents with young children, people who are blind, and people who use mobility aids, can spark conversations about the different ways we move around and what we need to do so comfortably.
• Understanding of how design and policy decisions impact people’s day-to-day: Particularly for decision-makers like transportation engineers and elected officials, a walk audit can reveal the consequences of past and ongoing design choices. A standard lane width, neighborhood speed limit, or distance between crosswalks is easy to question when you’re walking together along a busy corridor.
• Connections and partnerships needed to address these issues: Most importantly, bringing people together for the walk audit can help identify allies, activate champions, and bring more people on board with your goals to improve safety. This work can’t be done alone, and inviting necessary partners to a walk audit can jumpstart the conversations that turn into action and change.

Walk audits in action

In Harrisonburg, VA and Winchester, KY, walk audits brought together a wide range of partners to have important conversations about safety challenges and more. These were organized as part of the process to design and install quick-build demonstration projects, to bring everyone to the project site before designing a project and observe the conditions on the ground, building a shared understanding of the safety, access, and comfort challenges for people walking and biking.

Harrisonburg, VA

A walk audit on Mason Street was part of an effort to reconnect the community across this wide arterial. It was attended by city staff, community members, local business owners, and elected officials, all part of the quick build team. We also saw how quiet the road was at mid-day and though we had talked about the lack of green space, feeling the heat from the sun and the asphalt strongly reinforced the community’s need for shade. An unexpected conversation happened at a parking lot next to the street: the city staff, elected official, and local business owner had all been thinking about how to activate the underutilized space, but hadn’t yet connected on the issue. Walking the site together gave them a place to start the conversation to reimagine more than just the street in question, but the nearby opportunities as well. 

Winchester, KY

A walk audit on Boone Ave/KY-627, a state-owned route, was part of the process to build partnerships between the city and the state transportation cabinet. The walk brought city staff, nearby residents, school officials, state transportation staff, and regional partners together to see the challenges of the site. With high speeds and heavy traffic, particularly trucks cutting through, the need for traffic calming measures was clear. One participant from the state observed that this corridor looked okay from maps on the computer, but when walking it was easy to tell that the posted speed limit was just too fast. This walk audit helped strengthen relationships between people who work in different departments and build momentum for future community engagement, to get even wider input on the challenges of the corridor.

Getting started

There are many resources available to organize your own walk audit. Start with identifying your goals, target routes, and essential partners to send invitations and schedule a time. Make sure to hold some time before the walk audit, to set the stage, and after, to reflect on what everyone observed. Depending on your goals, data collection methods like AARP’s Walk Audit Worksheets and Survey123 from ArcGIS can help you collect the information you’re looking for. Use these toolkits from AARP, Safe Routes Partnership, and ACEEE to get started. And be sure to share your experiences to inspire others to conduct a walk audit themselves!

Learn more about participating in Week Without Driving at weekwithoutdriving.org/