This is part two of our coverage of Transportation Techies: Portland edition. Read part one here.
Portland, Ore., is known nationally as one of the country’s biking capitals, with more than 188 miles of bike lanes and one of the highest rates of bike commuting in the country. But even given its bikeway networks, “crossbikes,” and other infrastructure, bicyclists in the City of Roses, like those in many cities, are concerned with stressful street conditions and the barriers they pose to others.
At the latest Transportation Techies: Portland edition, part of the Association for Commuter Transportation annual conference, several presenters spoke about their efforts to document those conditions, and the importance and utility of capturing that data.
William Henderson, whose Ride Report app was previously featured on Mobility Lab, explained how the ride-tracking app works behind the scenes on users’ phones. The Ride Report team used machine learning to “train” the app, taking it on rides around Portland in order to teach it to recognize the kinds of gyroscopic movements indicative of biking. This allows the app to run in the background without it devouring battery by accessing a phone’s GPS coordinates (as Pokemon Go does, for example).
Short trips vs Long trips in Portland: plenty of trips under 2 miles, but they are much higher stress. pic.twitter.com/Waw56m3QlT
— Ride Report (@RideReportApp) August 1, 2016
By making a trip-logger that involves minimal forethought, Henderson said, it becomes easier for casual cyclists to use it. The ease-of-use led to thousands of logged rides over Portland, many of them rated for their stress level. These are combined into a back-end tool for planners, in which stress ratings are broken down on a block-by-block basis. Henderson and his team have already found a variety of observations in Portland’s stress ratings. While peak commute-time trips, for example, are consistently rated more stressful overall, some streets are rated less stressful at all hours. Those areas might hold keys to easing dangerous biking on other Portland streets.
Some of those more stressful streets, noted presenter Bryan Blanc, even had bike lanes. Bryan’s project, ride-tracking app ORcycle, which he developed for the Oregon Department of Transportation in 2014, also tracks comfort levels for bicyclists. His analysis found no statistical difference between comfort on busy arterial roads with painted lanes, and on arterials without lanes – painted lanes did not offer people on bikes much relief or perceived protection in the face of speeding traffic. This relation explains the importance of Portland’s decision this past February to establish protected bike lanes as the standard for new biking facilities. The city was the first in the country to codify the emerging consensus around protected lanes. The ORcycle app also allows users to make notes about specific streets, all of which are directed to ODOT planners.
It’s not always factored into biking conditions, but bicyclists are uniquely vulnerable to harmful air quality conditions on the streets. Presenter Alex Bigazzi first attempted to monitor local air quality through a system of bike-mounted sensors, but the high price tag led him to think about ways to cut costs and equipment. Ultimately, he created the prototype SPEC sensor, a handheld Bluetooth device that relies on the user’s phone for computing power, a move that cuts the cost of components considerably. Bigazzi hopes that the data his sensor eventually collects will help determine hotspots of poor air quality and inform efforts to improve conditions for everyone on Portland’s streets.
And on Portland’s latest and most anticipated bicycling development, Ryan Rzpecki, founder and CEO of Social Bicycles, previewed data from the company’s latest bikeshare system: Portland’s Biketown. In the system’s first two weeks, riders took 28,351 trips, with an average length of 2.18 miles and an average trip duration of 29.38 minutes. Notably, single-trip rides, which made up most of the bike rentals, are capped at 30 minutes of riding time before additional charges kick in.
Where did Portlanders ride on Day 1 of @BIKETOWNpdx? Here’s a heatmap of usage on launch day. #pdxtraffic #pdxbikes pic.twitter.com/3431poo2jR
— PDX Transportation (@PBOTinfo) July 25, 2016
Rzpecki noted that his observations indicate casual riders often don’t want to commit to membership periods – they just want one ride that will get them to their destination immediately. Having the single-trip option allows people a quick, no-obligation solution to their transportation quandary. That the single-ride type narrowly edges out annual-pass rides suggests Biketown may not be losing out on potential revenue from day passes.
For more on Portland’s history with open data and the local developers who are using it today, read our earlier coverage.
Photo, top: A Portlander on a decidedly comfortable ride along the Eastbank Esplanade on the Willamette River (M.V. Jantzen, Flickr).
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