App encouraging walking available in NW Romania city

Walk’n’ Smile, an app promoting walking and a healthy lifestyle, is available in Oradea, a city in northwestern Romania, beginning February of this year.

The app allows users to find a walking partner, check the CO2 saved by choosing walking over driving, assess the walkability of the city, or compete with other users over distances walked. The app is based on a traditional pedometer and supplements it with various functions, such as awards based on the number of steps, funny photos, a calories calculator, and a city walkability evaluation survey. With the help of augmented reality technology users can also create interesting photos, take a walk with exotic animals and celebrities such as Christiano Ronaldo, Pink, or Einstein, or they can recreate the famous Abbey Road photo with the Beatles. The app can be downloaded on both Android and iOS phones.

The app was launched as part of the CityWalk project, financed through the Danube Transnational Program, a financing instrument of the European Territorial Cooperation, better known as Interreg. Besides the app, a webpage offers information on the level of walkability in the partner cities: Ptuj, Szeged, Kamnik, Nyíregyháza, Žilina, Varaždin, Oradea, Varna, Pilsen, Valjevo, Belgrade and Stříbro.

The CityWalk project is aimed at helping cities in the Danube Region reduce emissions and noise and to become safer, better places to live, by increasing the role of more sustainable forms of mobility, especially active transport forms, such as walking and biking. To do so, the main focus of project is to improve the key conditions of walkability. The project is implemented in 9 countries: Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia and Slovenia.

(Photo: www.interreg-danube.eu)