Bike Safety Maps via Crowdsourcing

via Commute by Bike

This combines three of my favorite things – mapping, crowdsourcing, and bicycling – is something I can’t help cheer!

Earlier this month, at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, geography professor Dr. Trisalyn Nelson launched a new bike mapping website called BikeMaps.org. The website is a crowdsourced bike safety map that allows you to track things such as crashes, bike thefts, danger zones, and near misses. The map legend items include: citizen collision report, citizen near miss report, cyclist hazard, official collision report, and bike theft. There are also general alert areas, information about rider volume in a given area, as well as infrastructure (at least in Victoria) and an incident heat map.

Of course, as with any crowdsourced map, it relies on other people to populate it with data. Nonetheless, crowdsourcing has been shown to be immensely popular for preparedness and emergency response and has been widely used in recent disasters such as last year’s typhoon in the Philippines or the2010 Haiti earthquake. Open Street Map is perhaps the most prolific of crowdsourced mapping options on the internet, and it has a cycling friendly spin-off called Open Cycle Map. GoogleMaps also used a feedback option when they first launched the bike directions feature in 2010. And you can still request that they fix a problem on their maps, but it’s not really quite the same as crowdsourcing. What’s nice aboutBikeMaps.org is that it has a very specific focus on cycling hazards. So if that’s something you’re curious about before you head out on your bike, it could be your one-stop-shop for the information you need.

I spent some time playing with the map, and it’s definitely better in some places than others at the moment. Naturally, it’s a little Canada-centric at the moment, but it’s intended to be a global map. But as you can see from the data this morning, there’s definitely more information being populated in North America, with a focus around British Columbia. If you zoom into Victoria, B.C., where the map originated, you can see its got quite a lot of detail. The little circles with numbers tell you the number of incidents in a given area, and when you zoom in, the information becomes increasingly detailed. And if you really want to get a sense of where the most incidents are occurring, you can use the incident heat map option, which basically just combines all the incidents into one intensity map with red being the highest intensity of incidents and blue being the least. There’s also a nice bike infrastructure option on the legend, but it looks like it’s currently just limited to Victoria. Another nice feature is the rider volume, which pulls its data from Strava. So although the bike infrastructure is just limited to Victoria at the moment, you can get a sense of where people ride based on the rider volume data. Working in the background of BikeMaps.org is some fancy GIS (geographic information systems) to provide the nice incident intensity bubbles and heat map. All in all, it’s a pretty slick operation. The map’s creator feels that safety fears are one of the number one things preventing people from using bicycles more for transportation, and she hopes that this will help to alleviate some of those fears. Read more of her comments in this article from the Times Colonist. As she notes here:

With only 30 to 40 per cent of cycling accident data captured by traditional data sources, BikeMaps.org represents an important effort to fill data and information gaps. I love cycling and I commute by bike daily. But, especially as a mom, I am always looking for ways our family can ride as safely as possible.