BikeMaps Blog

Are you interested in making your city safer for cyclists? Become a BikeMaps.org city! BikeMaps.org uses citizen reports of cycling incidents to make cycling safer in your community. BikeMaps.org has been launched in Greater Victoria, Metro Vancouver, Edmonton, and Ottawa. The BikeMaps.org team is looking for the next city to become a BikeMaps.org city in 2017.

Interested? Submissions can take on a variety of forms – creativity is encouraged!

Submissions should answer the following questions:

• Where? Showcase your city;
• Who? Describe your group, organization or department;
• How? Explain how you will support outreach;
• Why? Share why you want to have better data; and,
• What? Tell us what you could do with the results.

Suggestions:

• Short video;
• Written proposal;
• Flash mob;
• Infographic; or
• Surprise us!

Deadline for submissions is August 31, 2016. Please contact Karen Laberee for more information or to make your submission.

Federal funding expands UVic BikeMaps.org to include Edmonton and Ottawa

The UVic Geography Spatial Pattern Analysis and Research ( SPAR) Lab in partnership with the Traffic Injury Research Foundation ( TIRF) were granted project funding from the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) to expand the BikeMaps.org project across Canada, beginning with Edmonton and Ottawa. BikeMaps.org, a citizen web-mapping tool, allows a cyclist to report near misses and crashes, which allows researchers to capture better data to make cycling safer. Founder of SPAR lab and BikeMaps.org, Dr.Trisalyn Nelson, says the main objective of the project is to use technology to produce knowledge and data that will help make cycling safer and accessible for all Canadians.

According to Karen Laberee, Director of BikeMaps.org and UVic Research Associate, “After its success in Victoria and Vancouver, we look forward to seeing other Canadian cities embrace BikeMaps.org.”

Link to federal announcement

Link to Traffic Research Injury Foundation

For more information, contact:

Karen Laberee, Director of BikeMaps.org

or Anne MacLaurin, Communications Officer, UVic Social Sciences

BikeMaps.org helps to make cycling safer by providing municipalities, the Province and other stakeholders with a supplementary database on cycling incidents. These citizen reports help transportation planners and engineers determine where upgraded (or new) cycling facilities are needed. More robust cycling incident data is the first step toward safer streets.

In addition to assisting municipalities with planning safer streets, BikeMaps.org can provide cyclists with the latest information on safety hot-spots. We’ve compiled collision data from ICBC and BikeMaps.org to develop a list of dooring caution zones in the City of Vancouver. Doorings were the most prevalent type of cycling collision reported through official reports (Urban Systems, 2015). In the five dooring incidents reported to BikeMaps.org, three of the five cyclists were injured, and two sustained injuries serious enough to require an emergency department visit or overnight hospital stay.

Have a look at the dooring caution-zones map and accompanying table of dooring caution-zones. If you cycle in these zones, be sure to keep adequate space from parked cars, or use a nearby designated cycling facility. A map of Vancouver’s cycle routes is available here.

Corridor upgrades like the one proposed by Streets For Everyone for Commercial Drive may significantly reduce or eliminate this type of cycling collision. Email the City of Vancouver Mayor and Council and the Drive Business Improvement Association (BIA) your thoughts about making the Drive a complete street! Let’s see if we can get Commercial Drive off this map!

Dooring Caution-Zones in Vancouver

Reference: Urban Systems. 2015. City of Vancouver Cycling Safety Study Final Report.

Active Living Research ALR is an interdisciplinary team with internationally recognized expertise in public health, transportation, planning, parks and recreation, school activity programs, behavioral science, and obesity prevention. ALR has recently released a research review, summarizing current knowledge on the health benefits and safety of active travel titled Moving Toward Active Transportation: How Policies Can Encourage Walking and Bicycling. BikeMaps.org researcher Dr. Meghan Winters was part of the ALR team that prepared the review, which also examined policies and programs that can help to increase walking and biking rates.

The main findings include:

• A growing number of recent studies have confirmed health benefits specifically for walking and cycling.

• The health benefits of active transportation exceed its risks of injury and exposure to air pollution.

• Safety is a key consideration for promoting active travel. Importantly, places with higher levels of walking and cycling also have greater safety for pedestrians.

• Provision of convenient, safe, and connected walking and cycling infrastructure is at the core of promoting active travel.

• Aside from specific infrastructure for cyclists and pedestrians, the way neighborhoods and communities are built affects levels of active travel.

• Walking or biking for daily travel needs can be promoted as a convenient and competitive option through programs that shift travel behavior.

• Policies that improve public transport, or make car use less attractive, increase the competitiveness of active travel modes.

• Policies to promote active travel will work best when implemented in comprehensive packages; these may include infrastructure and facility improvements, pricing policies, and education programs to achieve substantial shifts towards active modes.

After a year of BikeMappers pinning hazards, it became apparent that we needed to tweak some of our hazard mapping. Far too many hazards were being categorized as “other”. Combing through the detailed descriptions, we created new categories that better reflect the hazards that people were actually concerned about. We also removed the human behaviour hazard group. The rationale behind this was that any of these hazards were not persistent and therefore would do no good warning other cyclists. Further, hazards pinned under human behaviour categories could often be more accurately pinned as a near miss. We have also enabled certain hazards, such as icy roads or leaves on road, to disappear after a certain time period.

For our research we do not analyze any of the hazards that are pinned. We provide the hazard mapping as a service to our citizen science reporters. It is important that the distinction between near misses and hazards be made. If you’ve had a collision, fall, or near miss from a hazard, logging it as a collision or near miss will enable us to analyze the environmental and infrastructure characteristics that possibly contributed to the incident.

Our hazard mapping is quite a popular feature of BikeMaps.org. Cyclists who have turned on the alert feature for their riding area will receive notifications of new hazards pinned in their area. Municipalities can also choose to monitor their geographical area for new hazards. This is especially useful for smaller cities that do not have a 3-1-1 system in place.

Here is the list of all the hazards to choose from: