Case Study: Bristol City Council achieves city-wide crowd-sourcing of active-travel “bugbears” with Commonplace

Helping Bristol Council with their active travel response

Bristol City Council needed to crowd-sourced input on local “bugbears” — small but deterrent problems affecting walking and cycling — as part of ambitious active-travel targets (20% cycling by 2020). The council engaged Commonplace and used its Community Heatmap platform to reach a wide audience and collect structured, location-based feedback that could inform prioritisation.

Commonplace implemented a customised Community Heatmap where users pinned issue locations, rated severity, selected issue type and action, and could “agree” with others’ reports. The site drove 6,000 visitors and 9,148 contributions (with around 5,000 responses in a month), enabled sorting by priority, location and cycling persona, and produced evidence the council used to prioritise fixes and investment — turning crowd-sourced reports into actionable transport-planning data.

Bristol City Council

Phil Wright

Design, Engagement Manager