Why we built it

Public transport is often measured in money spent and services run, not in whether it actually gets people where they need to go. That does not tell a resident how their own municipality is doing, nor does it let a planner compare with the neighbours, because money and services say nothing about settlement, distance or density.

So we built one comparable number that shows how geography and mobility fit together, with the same method for all 357 municipalities.

The grade gives equal weight to two things: how well public transport covers everyday life, and how necessary it is to own a car to make that life work.

We use Entur timetables and the OpenStreetMap road network, with population figures from Statistics Norway and municipal boundaries from Kartverket. The full calculation is open on the method page.

The Norwegian Mobility Atlas is for anyone making decisions, investments or arguments about mobility in Norway: municipalities, county authorities and public transport authorities, but also politicians, property developers and civil society organisations who need geography and data rather than a hunch.

Much of what has to be decided is about where something goes. A shelter, a mobility hub, a city bike station. It only works in the right place, and that is harder to judge than it sounds. The Atlas shows where a car is genuinely necessary. It does not say what should go there, whether anyone will use it, or how you later show that it changed anything. That is the work we do day to day.

This is a first version. The method is our judgement, not an answer key, and we will correct it when someone points out something we have missed.

The Norwegian Mobility Atlas is made by Beta Mobility. Read the method and sources.

Beta Mobility Consulting AS, Universitetsgata 18, 0164 Oslo, Norway.