Change to Walking

What is it?

The Change to Walking campaign helps us raise awareness about the power of walking to make our communities cleaner, healthier and safer. 

Change to Walking is about showcasing the many positive impacts of walking.

Every step we take makes us healthier, connects us to neighbours and makes a small, but positive difference to Victoria's environmental challenges.

Sign up any time in May or June 2025.

Our campaign is designed to count the positive impact your steps are having in your community, and why making our short, local trips by walking is important.

Why be part of Change to Walking? 

This is not just about being healthy and getting more active.

People living in Australia's cities generate a high amount of transport-related pollution, mostly from car trips. Our per-capita transport emission are more than 3x higher than the G20 average.

In Melbourne we generate amongst the highest per-person Co2 emissions in the world. This is partly due to the development of car-dependent suburbs, where people have easier access to roads than other transport.

But while many people do not live within a walkable distance to shops, schools and other destinations there are also lots of short car trips occuring.

There are 4.8 million short car trips (less than 1km) in Melbourne and Geelong every week! 

Short car trips create more pollution per kilometre. They're also the easiest trips to swap to help Victorian neighbourhoods become cleaner, safer and healthier!

Cleaner

• Short car trips create relatively higher emissions so they're the best ones to swap.
• Swapping half of short vehicle trips under 2km to walking (and 10% of longer vehicle trips to walking and Public Transport combined) would save 900,000 tonnes of Co2 emissions in Victoria each year.
  
  

Healthier

• Walking more makes us feel better.
• Walking more often improves physical health.
• Walking brings communities closer together because we meet and see others in our neighbourhoods, and this makes us all feel safer.

Safer neighbourhood streets

• Walking instead of driving for short trips reduces traffic in neighbourhoods, and parking chaos around schools and shops and other places where lots of people walk.
• Walking helps keep people of all ages and abilities safer in our communities. This particularly includes children, but also older adult walkers (who are currently over-represented in crashes).
• Put simply, when there are less vehicles on our roads the number of crashes typially drops
  
  

How does Change to Walking work?

Simply sign up and we'll send you a weekly email until the end of June 2025.

Each of these emails will direct you to a short survey where you can answer some quick quesitons about how much you walked that week. You might like to try to build up your walking each week!

You can record as little as one walking trip in the month of June, and we'll stiill count your steps towards our first 'Chnage to Walking' positive impacts tally!

 Join our campaign to:

• Help us share the impact of your current local walking trips.
• Swap car trips to extra walking. 
• Or, swap part of a car trip to walking.

You can also tell us about any barriers to walking that exist in your community.

By signing up to Change to Walking this June, you’re helping us show Victoria's decision-makers how they could be supporting the shift to healthier, cleaner and safer communities for all.

Sign up now to walk more this June! Simply head across to our sign-up page to get started.