Bikewise
Bikewise is a Google Map-based online application created by the Cascade Bicycle Club to track bicycle crashes, road hazards, and thefts. The concept is to share our experiences with researchers, relevant agencies, and other bicyclists with the goal of improving conditions and making bicycling safer and more enjoyable for everyone. To use Bikewise, simply create an account, set-up your profile, and start logging your info. Since the application was developed in the Pacific Northwest, the data is heavily skewed in that direction, but information can be entered for any location.
Bikewise →
9 Responses to “Bikewise”
Bicycling is getting heavily skewed in the Pacific Northwest! Please come up to Portland for these three weeks of Pedalpalooza fun that started with a parade yesterday. BikePortland.org has coverage for you to read up on and shift2bikes.org has all of your pedalpalooza events listed!!!!
Love it, but would love it even more if you could post good routes or safe ways to get somewhere. eg: “8000 block of Lowell Ave, Overland Park KS: A great way to move north-south while avoiding the traffic on Metcalf. Scenic, shady, and not at all busy.” Anyone know a site like that?
SoCal isn’t looking too shabby either! More than 100 incidents or hazards reported so far. Portland and the Area of Bays are seriously lagging.
So, if an area has few to no hazards or incidents reported, does that indicate low participation or does it indicate a safe area? I suppose there’s no way to know…
At this point even the Seattle area is too undersampled to indicate safety. This is really a long term project… one that we might hope would be coordinated by our departments of transportation. But they don’t seem too interested.
What I’m getting at is that it seems they also need to be collecting data for safe routes. If they’re only collecting data for collisions/thefts/hazards, there will only be high participation in those areas where there are high numbers of these negative incidents. Using your comment about Portland and the Bay Area as an example, it could be argued that there is lower participation in those areas because there are fewer negative incidents to report. I’m not saying this is necessarily so, but you get my drift. When you look at it in this way, zero participation is the ultimate goal, indicating no collisions, thefts, or road hazards to report…
Thanks for the link! I just posted on our local map an incident from over a year ago involving an accident that was due, at least in part, to a physical hazard on the bike trail that has not been fixed since. The accident was a head-on collision between two cyclists who did not see each other around an overgrown shrub that was blocking the view on a curve in the bike trail. I was not involved, though I witnessed it while on my bike. I had always thought there should be a means for getting this information out to others. I’ve been tempted to take a pair of shears to that shrubbery every time I see it.
I agree that a good routing application is also needed, where we can tag different routes, and have information about the rider, so that when a new rider asks for a route, they can get something appropriate to them, and we can generate a network of routes, cobbled together from lots of people’s tagged routes… This incident/infrastructure reporting is only half of the system. Ideally someone will write such an application, and all the data will be made public, so we can mash them up on the Open(Cycle|Street)Map, or Google Maps, Google Earth, or wherever.
We had another death in Boise this week. A 16 year old driver hit a member of a bike pack on a popular biking street, Hill. That is 3 deaths in a month. Very sad.