help bikers find good routes and collect data to improve them

Commuting by bike in Los Angeles can be complicated: road and path availability, air quality, traffic and accidents, and bright sunlight all affect the quality of the ride. What if a convenient web-based technology could give bike commuters daily feedback on the quality and safety of their preferred routes, and suggest quality-of-ride modifications in route and time of day? What if bike commuters could work together as a community to document hazards to biking and make positive changes to their local routes? UCLA’s Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS) is collaborating with Los Angeles bikers to make this vision a reality.   We are designing an application that runs on mobile phones that enables bike commuters to log their bike route using GPS and provide geo-tagged annotations (images, text notes) along with automatic sensor data (accelerometer / sound) to infer the roughness and traffic density of the road. Using this information, we plan to create an interface to enable bike commuters to plan their route based on both safety and interest vectors.

We are currently running a pilot, Biketastic,  in which  bikers can share their routes which are automatically annotated by noise level, roughness, variation in elevation and duration of stops.