As one of several fascinating presentations last week at Mobility Lab’s latest Transportation Techies’ meetup – Bike Hack Night VIII – Michael Graham has created spider maps of bike networks to provide a new perspective on how routes connect – or don’t – to each other.
The stylized, Metro-esque maps represent Graham’s larger vision of providing cyclists a tool to navigate bike routes more easily with a level of detail appropriate to their route.
Using the District Department of Transportation’s official bike map for context, Graham pointed out that the level of detail in the official map can be confusing and intimidating for someone hoping to follow a trail to reach their destination.
Michael Graham
For example, Graham pointed out that once riders enter a bikeway, they don’t need to know the details of the route until their exit point – much like how a driver on Interstate 95 doesn’t worry about what they’re passing until they reach their exit. Similarly, the spider maps allow cyclists to zoom out to low levels of detail, but have the option to zoom in to understand turns or other changes in their route.
In addition to serving as a navigational aid, these maps can be used for advocacy, providing a new perspective on how disconnected bike networks are in most cities. The artistic approach enables more people to understand the deficits in their city’s bike networks, which an effective communicator could then combine with additional projects (like some of the ones presented by fellow Techies later in the evening ).
Other Techies have managed to make actual art with their actual bikes.
Michael Wallace, known on the internet at WallyGPX, shared his process for creating GPS-based works of art by tracking his bike rides around Baltimore’s street grid. Wallace sketches his routes on map print-outs, and completes the entire “drawing” on one continuous ride. His internet popularity serves as an indirect form of bike advocacy, showing how people can explore their environment in a way that’s not possible in cars.
WallyGPX shows a rendering of his art and the final result
Transportation Techies leader Michael Schade presented some of his own work this session. He discussed how he has explored bike representation through photography. Using #BikeDC and #bike tags on Flickr, Schade created a heat map to follow where Flickr users most photograph bike culture around Washington D.C. Anyone exploring the map can click around and see the tagged photo stream.
Michael Schade
Analyzing bike safety
Manushi Majumdar noticed a problem in the public discourse of bike safety in the District. Reports tend to only focus on fatal crashes, but not the thousands of injuries that cyclists suffer from drivers every year. This inspired her, as a data scientist, to analyze bike-related crashes to understand the distribution of these injuries throughout the city.
Majumdar explored crash report statistics to find major and minor injuries, locations, and vehicles involved. She then plotted them on a D.C. map to visualize the magnitude of more than 140,000 reported crashes, adding in detail about how good the bicycle infrastructure is where crashes have occurred.
Indeed, many bike injuries happen where there are no protected lanes or cycle tracks, which Majumdar said “gives all the more reason to keep building infrastructure to protect bicyclists.” Considering D.C.’s initiative, this is a practical way to identify areas where better infrastructure is needed.
Manushi Majumdar
Those crash analyses pair well with Jaihui Wu’s data-driven project to create cycling safety maps. So far, Wu and colleagues have amassed a range of data points about District streets, including social factors such as moving and parking violations, as well as road features like topography and bike infrastructure.
As an experiment, the team used these factors to rate segments of road – defined as the length between any two intersections – and then compared the computer’s analysis with ratings from human observers. Volunteers watched videos of Wu’s bike rides, divided by segment, and rated the levels of stress they believed Wu experienced. The team factored in each volunteer’s own overall cycling-confidence level, helping to understand how different riders see a stretch of road.
Not surprisingly, the presence of bike facilities led to more positive ratings. The most important factor, though, turned out to be the length of the road segment, with volunteers guessing that longer stretches lead to faster car speeds. Though Wu has only catalogued 500 of the 13,000 “segments” in D.C., he said that for now, the purely computer-driven analysis doesn’t quite keep up with human ratings, leaving human input as a vital factor in planning decisions.
Jaihui Wu
Chris Slatt
Also, Chris Slatt shared his Parking Dirty web tool, which collected images from traffic cameras in Arlington County, Va., to quantify just how often bike lanes are blocked, hopefully giving public officials more of an impetus to enforce safety laws. Considering the tool’s potential for creating actionable information, Slatt expressed interest in sharing Parking Dirty with advocates who have the resources to tackle a more comprehensive set of lanes.
Photos by M.V. Jantzen/Flickr (view more of his photos from Bike Hack Night VIII here) and Paul Mackie/Mobility Lab.
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