Transform Transport’s 15min City Score was developed in 2024 from a Toolkit tested on 112 cities of the EU Mission, before being extended in 2026 to a Europe Map covering 786 European Functional Urban Areas (FUAs). Data from this map indicates that cities in Southern and Central Europe generally score higher than cities in Northern Europe — a result that contrasts with certain received assumptions about the relationship between the Nordic urban model and pedestrian accessibility. Not because these cities have adopted a particular urban doctrine, but because the configuration of their services and transport networks produces, in practice, measurable superior accessibility.

This result settles a debate that had become mired in controversy. The fifteen-minute city had become, depending on the country, either a promise of progressive urban development or a symbol of state surveillance and restrictions on freedom. By finally having a standardized measure across hundreds of cities, urbanists and local elected officials can reframe the question on concrete ground: what actually makes a city accessible? Transform Transport’s data provides an answer that ideology, in both directions, had made difficult to articulate.

The essentials

  • More than 80% of Stockholm residents have access on foot to their essential services within fifteen minutes, according to Transform Transport’s 15min City Score. The Toolkit was tested on 112 EU Mission cities during its 2024 development; the Europe Map published in 2026 covers 786 European FUAs.
  • According to Transform Transport (2026), cities in Southern and Central Europe generally achieve better walkability scores than cities in Northern Europe like Stockholm.
  • The challenge for mid-sized European cities is to understand which lever to prioritize: service provision, transport frequency, or residential densification.

A score that measures what urban plans avoid quantifying

The 15min City Score does not measure political intention. It measures a result: how many residents can reach, walking or cycling from their home, a set of services defined as essential within fifteen minutes. Schools, food shops, green spaces, health facilities, public transport stops. The methodology aggregates geolocalized service data and cross-references it with the actual distribution of population, not with raw density.

This is where the score reveals something useful that standard indicators mask. Population density is often used as a proxy for urban accessibility: the denser a city, the closer its inhabitants would supposedly be to everything. Transform Transport invalidates this shortcut. According to Transform Transport data (2026) and academic research (Bakogiannis, 2022), cities in Southern Europe generally achieve better pedestrian accessibility scores than cities in Northern Europe, including those displaying high residential densities — which shows that population concentration does not mechanically create accessibility.

The Toolkit was developed using the 112 cities of the EU Mission as case studies — a programme that actually comprises 112 cities (100 from the EU and 12 from countries associated with Horizon Europe), selected from 377 applications by the European Commission. This framework is important: it means that measuring urban accessibility is not treated as a matter of comfort or ideology, but as a transition indicator. A city where residents don’t need a car to access essential services consumes less transport energy, emits less, and reduces its dependence on expensive road infrastructure.

Stockholm is not a model of density, but of service coverage

What distinguishes Stockholm from cities with similar density is the capillarity of its public transport network. SL, the transport company for the Stockholm region, manages one of Europe’s most integrated networks: metro, trams, buses, regional trains, and ferries operate on a single fare system, with high frequencies even during off-peak hours. This is not a radial network designed to bring suburban commuters to a centre, but a meshed network linking neighborhoods to each other.

This architecture has direct consequences for fifteen-minute accessibility. A resident of Södermalm and a resident of Vällingby, an outlying neighborhood built in the 1950s according to the Swedish satellite city model, can both reach the majority of their essential services without a car. Vällingby is precisely the opposite example of a dormitory city: designed from the outset with a metro station, shops, and schools and health facilities within walking distance, it predated the concept of the fifteen-minute city by several decades, without ever bearing that name.

The public investment underlying this result is structural. Sweden dedicates a significant share of its public resources to public transport, placing it among Europe’s most generous countries in this area. But spending alone doesn’t explain everything: institutional organization matters just as much. Stockholm’s integrated housing-transport planning dates back to the 1950s, with the 1952 plan and the development of Vällingby, according to a model called the “pearl necklace” (pärlband) in which each new residential area is conditioned on the prior existence of a rail or metro connection. The 1970s-80s, by contrast, were marked by the disintegration of this approach, with transport management transferred to the regional level, separating it from housing which remained a municipal responsibility. Stockholm’s contemporary challenge is precisely to restore the coordination that its historical model had made possible.

When density becomes a trap without a network

According to Transform Transport data (2026) and academic research (Bakogiannis, 2022), cities in Southern Europe — potentially including Athens, Naples, and certain Spanish cities — generally achieve better pedestrian accessibility scores than Northern European cities like Stockholm. This counterintuitive result invites closer examination of what actually determines accessibility at the neighborhood scale.

Several mechanisms can explain disappointing scores in certain dense urban contexts, regardless of geography. The first is functional segregation: in some urban centers, residential densification has occurred without sufficient integration of local services. Large supermarkets concentrate on the periphery, health facilities are unevenly distributed, and accessible green spaces remain rare in some neighborhoods despite very high population density.

The second mechanism is public transport networks that are insufficiently frequent or geographically fragmented. A metro station 900 meters away but served every twenty minutes during rush hour does not make a neighborhood accessible in the sense that the 15min City Score understands it. Accessibility is a temporal concept as much as a spatial one: it incorporates waiting time, not merely physical distance.

This gap between density and accessibility has a direct political implication for European mayors facing climate targets. Densification in itself is insufficient to reduce car dependency. A city that compresses its population without simultaneously improving its service and transport provision can produce the opposite effect: more residents, still dependent on cars to access distant services, in a more congested public space.

The fifteen minutes is not an ideology, it is an indicator of public service

The controversy around the fifteen-minute city mainly flourished in the United Kingdom and the United States from 2022 onward, fueled by conspiracy theories claiming the concept would serve to lock residents into delimited zones and monitor their movements. Carlos Moreno, the Franco-Colombian urbanist who popularized the term in Paris, had to devote part of his energy to refuting accusations that his work in no way justified.

This noise had a real effect: it made serious discussion of urban accessibility and local services difficult in several English-speaking countries and in part of European public discourse. Elected officials gave up using the term to avoid controversy, even when their policies amounted to exactly that.

The value of Transform Transport’s quantitative approach is precisely to extract the subject from this debate. The 15min City Score does not measure a philosophy of public space, nor a restricted right to mobility. It measures whether, from your home, you can access a school, a doctor, a supermarket, and a transport station without a car in less than a quarter of an hour. It is a measure of public service in the most functional sense of the term.

In this reading, the fifteen-minute city ceases to be a project of an urban left that would decarbonize lifestyles, and becomes a criterion for evaluating the quality of a service network. A city that scores high is a city that distributes its facilities well across its territory. A city with a low score has a territorial planning problem, not a political position.

What mid-sized cities can learn from the study

The Toolkit was tested on 112 cities of varying sizes and profiles, and the Europe Map covers 786 FUAs, far beyond major metropolises alone. It includes intermediate-sized cities that do not benefit from the investment resources of Stockholm, Paris, or Amsterdam. This is perhaps where the insights of the score are most useful.

For a city of 150,000 to 300,000 inhabitants, the most effective lever is not always the same. In some cases, service distribution is satisfactory but the bus network too infrequent to be attractive. In others, service exists but essential services are concentrated in a single neighborhood, leaving peripheries poorly covered. The score decomposed by dimension allows identifying which of the two problems takes priority.

Cities that have started using the tool as part of the Mission EU programme have reported practical applications: some have used the score to guide decisions about locating new health facilities or green spaces, targeting areas where accessibility was weakest. Others have used granular mapping to renegotiate with bus operators the routes and frequencies of lines. This is usage quite removed from the grand visionary urban planning project often associated with the concept of the fifteen-minute city.

This granularity is valuable in a context of severe budget constraints for local authorities. Metropolises like Stockholm built their advantage over decades of continuous, coordinated regional investment. Most mid-sized European cities have neither the time nor the means to replicate this trajectory. But they can, based on a precise measurement of their shortcomings, concentrate limited investments where accessibility returns will be strongest.

Social innovation in cities does not always require grand plans. It can come down to a more frequent evening bus line, the opening of a health center in an under-equipped neighborhood, or the creation of an accessible green space in a dense zone. What the 15min City Score provides is the ability to know which of these modest choices will have the most effect on residents’ daily lives. It is less spectacular than an urban renovation plan, and probably more effective.

This kind of pragmatic approach, based on precise data rather than grand visions, actually resembles how other successful social policies have been built: by first measuring what is lacking, by intervening strategically, and by evaluating results. The question that remains open is one of governance: in countries where transport planning and service planning fall under different institutions, who coordinates, and with what authority?

Sources

  1. Transform Transport, 15min City Score — Toolkit for Urban Walkability Analytics, 2024: https://transformtransport.org/research/urban-mobility-metrics/15min-city-score-toolkit-urban-walkability-analytics/
  2. Transform Transport, 15min City Score Europe Map, 2026: https://transformtransport.org/research/urban-mobility-metrics/15-minutes-city-score-europe-map/
  3. Zenodo, 15min City Score Europe Map Dataset, 2026: https://zenodo.org/records/19610329
  4. NetZeroCities, 112 Mission Cities: https://netzerocities.eu/mission-cities/
  5. Wikipedia, Storstockholms Lokaltrafik (SL): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storstockholms_Lokaltrafik
  6. Paulsson (2020), The city that the metro system built, Urban Studies: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0042098019895231
  7. C40 Cities, Stockholm Walkable City Drives Long-Term Growth: https://www.c40.org/case-studies/cities100-stockholm-walkable-city-drives-long-term-growth/
  8. International Association of Public Transport (UITP), comparative reports on public transport spending in Europe
  9. Mission EU 100 Climate-neutral and Smart Cities, European Commission programme
  10. Carlos Moreno, The Fifteen-Minute City, 2022
  11. Stockholms läns landsting / SL, annual reports on the Stockholm region transport network