Meetup 13/10

Notes - collaboratively taken by the attendees - from our meetup on 13/10.

Short description Bike Data Project

Little is known about how cyclists move around in cities today. If there’s data available, it’s closed and restricted data sold by one single app provider or static data collected through manual counts. If we want to have more people cycling in cities and make the bicycle as easy and logical to opt for as the car, we also need to get the same data insights into cyclists’ behavior as we do have about car transport.

To make the Bike Data Project work we ask for a simple favor from the cycling community. We ask different types of cyclists (e.g. commuters, delivery riders, sportsmen and tourists) to track their bicycle rides via their preferred mobile application and donate their data to our community-driven bike data platform. Some people already track their activity for training purposes. That’s great but we also really want to take into account the short routes like commuting to work or just taking a quick ride to the grocery store. In return, the anonymous aggregated cycling data will be opened up to the public and can be freely used by anyone. The collective data gives us patterns we can use to demonstrate our cause.

Slack invite

With this link you can also join our Bike Data Project Slack: https://join.slack.com/t/bikedataproject/shared_invite/zt-hr00amgw-elYn9WbdFHLta8qQKW_wvQ

Agenda for the first Bike Data Project meetup (CET - Brussels time):

18:30 Introductions - tour de table 18:50 Project presentation Bike Data Project (including the next steps) 19:15 Q&A 19:30 Brainstorming sessions in different teams 20:10 Closure and final remarks

Project Presentation

• provide open data to decision makers, citizens, communities in order to make cities more liveable

• one platform connecting and aggregating to different existing apps (Garmin, Strava)

• not only from app : import files kml is also possible

• based on crowdsourcing: cyclists are sharing their data

• global bike data platform open source

• a mobile app is existing but not available for the moment

• in partnership with Brussels mobility

• building an open source ecosystem of tools to analyse and visualise open bike data and obtain smart cycling insights.

  • set up the platform

  • project launch last week : 370000 rides - 6 millions km

  • heatmap

  • opening aggregated anonymized data in Nov

  • diving into data during a specific event

next steps for the project

• add more meaningful graphs and stats

• add more maps, especially open source alternative (OSMand) and FabMob tracker

• publish aggregated anonymised data

Very interesting project from an activist in Amsterdam: https://dirkmjk.nl/nl/2016/12/rood-licht-voor-fietsers

Needs

• local communities needed in different cities

• spread the information, tool and platform

• How make this project more sustainable ? sponsors ?

• involve cities

Other ideas discussed

• Let's create an overview of all available open bike data sources and keep this list up-to-date with the help of the community (crowdsourcing).

• Diversity is key to make this project successful: what other ways exist to collect cycling data?

• It would be great if users could upload their KML files from Google Maps to the Bike Data Project.

• Also schools could benefit from the Bike Data Project: can we set up a seperate project with some schools to learn how everyone comes to school?