Data Capture for "Bicycling Danger"

To bring awareness to the dangers of bicycling around Zürich.

heatmap of bikeable.ch data, with bike deaths overlayed as points

Situation

Biking on city streets requires a hyper-awareness to avoid injury, or worse. Cars pull out without looking, bike lanes are obstructed by delivery trucks, drivers are often distracted by their phones, and some drivers are just plain aggressive.

Problem

There are existing efforts to suggest infrastructure improvements, (e.g. bikeable and Züri wie neu). These platforms don't capture the "quantity" of danger to bicyclists.

Implication

The danger presented to bicyclists should to be quantified and presented visually to influence the push for safer streets. Until now, there is no way to understand how often and where bicyclists are in dangerous situations.

Need

Data capture of "bicycling danger". Using a small GPS/LoRa piece of hardware, bicyclists can push a button mounted to their handlebars, and anonymously upload their GPS position to The Things Network as they ride. The public data can be viewed and analyzed in real-time, including heatmaps to show hotspots of dangerous situations.

Notes

If the project catches on, and this hardware can be produced cheaply enough, we can scale-up by distributing the hardware with a crowdsourcing campaign or sponsorship from bike groups or bike sharing companies.
This idea is inspired by the 2017 Make Zurich project "Voodoo Sonic - A LoRaWAN-connected Voodoo doll for making noise complaints." from @tamberg

makezurich / open-challenge-ideas-2020