Beat The Street is a concept to get people choosing to walk much more – often powered by child pester power.

The idea is to make walking locally – whether to school or some other destination such as a libraries, cinemas, etc – into a game. Effectively a much more compelling logging of walking that simple Step counting.

Because of the set up costs for a new area, rolling out Beat the Street across small populations apparently isn’t viable. Typically, the average cost of Beat the Street works out at around £1 per head of population, but this formula only ‘works’ for populations above 75,000. This is why they usually encourage people to try to scope a project across a whole Borough, rather than one smaller ward or area such as East Dulwich.

I’ve been give a rough estimate, to roll Beat the Street out across Southwark would be around £250,000 and that this could see around 14% of the population (of 302,000) would be actively engaged: 42,300 people. This works out around £6 per active participant.

I need to see if it would be worth trying to get a group of stakeholders from across the Southwark together to see if there is an appetite for a Borough-wide project. Typically Beat the Street has been funded through the Public Health and Transport departments of Local Authorities, sometimes with additional support from local companies who want to fund this as part of their Corporate Social Responsibility.

Would you take part?