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DIYcity Challenge #4: bikes

Submitted by John Geraci on 24 February 2009 - 5:42pm to Discussions.

DIYcity Challenge #4: Create an app that promotes bike riding in the city somehow: makes it easier to get from point A to point B, makes it less stressful, simpler, whatever.

Ianb has an idea for a "Cooperative Bike Share" that uses just a few combination locks and text messaging to create a bike share program for local communities. (People at DIYcity Portland are considering the possibility of testing the concept in their city).

It gets me to thinking - what other ways could you use web technologies to make riding a bike around the city easier? How could you use maps, apis, user input, whatever, to support bike riding as opposed to driving?

This is a pretty broad-open question, and submissions/ideas may be widely varied. Ianb's idea is inspiring, but don't let it guide your thinking too much for your answer.

If you have an actual app to submit in response, submit it here and it will be reposted as its own post. If you want to contribute a thought, use the reply link below.

Next week we'll move on to Challenges that aren't so totally transportation-centered...

24 Feb18:30

Re: DIYcity Challenge #4: bikes

By Jordan

Hi all,

I'll submit our website as something that makes it easier and safer to
get from point A to point B in New York: http://www.ridethecity.com

We're working on some pretty significant enhancements right now... I'd
be interested in hearing your thoughts.

Thanks,
Jordan

On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 1:13 PM, wrote:
> DIYcity Challenge 'DIYcity Challenge #4: bikes' by John Geraci
>
> DIYcity Challenge #4: *Create an app that promotes bike riding in the
> city somehow: makes it easier to get from point A to point B, makes it
> less stressful, simpler, whatever.*

24 Feb19:18

Don't have an existing app

By reikiman

Don't have an existing app in mind ... but I do a lot of non-car travel around my (sub-)urban area including bicycling. Some thoughts of what might be useful are:-

A map showing traffic congestion that could impact bicyclists. There are printed maps from transit agencies showing statistically which roads are more or less dangerous to bicyclists. But maybe there's a way to gather that dynamically in real time and broadcast over a wireless network.

A map showing bus routes and helping create a travel plan integrating bicycling with bus routes. (e.g. carrying a bicycle on board or on a rack) Dynamic information about bus location and whether the bus bicycle rack is full or not.

Shared collecting of direct user experience with bicycling given streets. Some of that data could be transferred to transit agencies e.g. to fix potholes or help them understand routes used by a lot of bicyclists.

- David Herron, http://www.7gen.com

25 Feb02:29

Re: don't have an existing app

By John Geraci

> There are printed maps from transit agencies
> showing statistically which roads are more or less
> dangerous to bicyclists.

Interesting. Are these maps available online?

I was thinking that a useful app would be a web page that takes a start point and end point and gives you directions to get from A to B following bike paths. Sort of like HopStop or Gmaps Directions but for bikes.

Would be even more interesting though to plot a course for bikers from A to B based on road safety ratings - plot the safest way to get to your destination.

25 Feb02:32

Re: plotting safest routes

By John Geraci

Oop - clearly I hadn't read the post below this one when I wrote that last message. Check out http://www.ridethecity.com/ for exactly what I was describing.

Nice work. Any way you can open it up to make it available to any city?

25 Feb04:00

Re: Re: plotting safest routes

By Jordan

There are similar efforts in other cities (see bycycle.org for
Portland, OR and Milwaukee, WI, for example) and we're currently
rolling Ride the City out to other cities in the U.S. The good news is
that a lot of cities are starting to publish bike facility GIS data
(e.g. bike lanes, separated paths, and recommended routes) on their
websites. For example, see San Francisco, Chicago, and Austin.

CloudMade (http://maps.cloudmade.com/) has OpenStreetMap-based maps
and a routing API that purports to give you bicycle route directions
anywhere they have map data. I think their routing is based more on
keeping cyclists on secondary roads than anything more sophisticated,
but it's a start and the great thing about OSM is that it can be
updated by anyone.

Jordan

25 Feb06:42

ah, I only know of the map

By reikiman

ah, I only know of the map for santa clara county. I'm assuming other local transit agencies would (??sometimes??) publish similar maps.

http://www.vta.org/schedules/bikeways_map.html

The map is based on accident data (as I recall) and shows that the most dangerous areas are where bicycles are in the vicinity of fast moving cars. Duh. These are the expressways (50 miles/hr speed limit and they have bicycle lanes), and places where highway traffic is merging with city streets. I really agree with it having tried several bicycling routes.

BTW There's a similar concern for walkability as there is to bikeability. I wrote a blog post, Walkability and walkable cities where I started from an inspiration that there could be a map where we crowdsource data about factors in cityscapes that impede or improve walkability and can produce maps showing which areas are walkable (or not). But I found a project http://www.walkscore.com/ which is already doing this and they have a bunch of interesting information. I had a little bit of email exchange with them, and they're not at the moment in any kind of open source model but possibly might do so maybe possibly in the future maybe.

- David Herron, http://www.7gen.com

02 Mar20:29

Interesting Bike Site w/ User Input

By John Geraci

I found a link to this site in a blog post that was discussing DIYcity over the weekend, the Cambridge Cycling Campaign's "journey planner" map:

http://www.camcycle.org.uk/map/route/

Users enter their own bike routes through the town, rating their routes for length, time and "quietness" (how nice).

66 journeys entered in the past 24 hours.

Seems like a great way for people to collaborate on the best bike routes around a city/town. Nice public resource.

Every town should have one of these...

02 Mar20:39

Another bike site

By clint

I saw this site the other day and thought it had great possibilities.

http://googlemapsbikethere.org/

01 Jul16:43

Bike sites from Finland

By apoikola

The metropolitan area of Helsinki has this journey planner for biking: http://kevytliikenne.ytv.fi/en/

And Helsinki has open feedback channel for cyclists to discuss development of the cycling environment:

http://fillarikanava.hel.fi/

PS: It seems that the challenges are attracting quite many links to existing services... would need some way to effectively copy the formats from city to city and country to country