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URI Bike-mounted sensor could boost the mapping of safe cycling routes
mhalle wrote 4 min ago:
This device would also be useful in places with street-side bike lanes
or no bike lanes at all, to see how closely bicyclists ride next to
parked cars.
Dooring remains one of the greatest threats to bicyclist safety in many
locations. Even places with great bike infrastructure often have
streets with parking where cyclists must ride.
kjkjadksj wrote 9 min ago:
Safe cycling routes are misunderstood. The best thing is taking the
lane so you are actually visible. If you take the lane, most streets
become very safe and mundane in my experience. Four lane roads are even
better than two lane because people can easily merge around you, you
can stay out of dooring range and be very visible to traffic. On two
lane roads people tend to get a little angry if you take the lane,
although that is what you absolutely must do because the alternative is
riding in the door zone and people squeezing you passing in the same
lane.
jwagenet wrote 3 hours 8 min ago:
I donât know Seattle so Iâd be curious to know if the proximity and
accident hotspots are also high traffic zones in general, whether they
have a bike like (and how itâs placed), and if the routes are even
bike routes or just routes that riders comfortable jostling in traffic
like me took. Comfortable riders may also skew the data by being
willing to âlane splitâ at red lights to pass stopped cars rather
than waiting at the back in lane.
Having biked a lot in SF, my impression is the best protected bike
lanes are on wide roads like Folsom/Howard, Fell/Oak, etc. where
proximity isnât generally an issue, but Iâd expect intersections to
be riskier due to higher car speeds. While cars passing on isnât an
issue on the Wiggle with a critical mass of riders, on neighborhood
streets where sharing the road is obligated the drivers can be
scariest, especially in the Sunset. In NYC, an abundance of one lane,
one way streets make controlling an entire street easier.
The reality of city design at the moment is almost any bike route will
require the sharing the road with cars at some point, usually at the
start and end of a ride, because bike lane and âbike routeâ
coverage is often poor in residential areas and business districts.
micromacrofoot wrote 2 hours 16 min ago:
I am willing to give it a good try even if it's never perfect!
I live in a major city and the increased traffic from scooters
almost feels like it could support a separate lane even if bikes
didn't exist
aerophilic wrote 3 hours 12 min ago:
Just to plug a friend⦠Velo.ai does similar things⦠but has other
stuff going on: [1] Interesting to see how these two would compare, but
my first (light) glance points to velo.ai being further alongâ¦
URI [1]: https://www.velo.ai/
pedalpete wrote 3 hours 14 min ago:
As a long-time cyclist and former bike courier, I think most of the
proximity concerns are probably of my own doing. I wonder if the device
somehow accounts for this.
My initial reaction is that an accelerometer might be a better
data-point, or combining this with accelerometer data.
I'm working on the assumption that a smoother path means I am
interacting less with traffic or other hazards.
pimlottc wrote 2 hours 25 min ago:
Iâm not sure how much that matters. You wonât need to initiate
close passes as often on a safer street.
gpm wrote 2 hours 21 min ago:
Given a choice between a street where the cars are stuck in 2km/hr
traffic and I'm passing them with a less than foot (0.3m) gap, or a
street with 70km/hr traffic where they're passing me with a 1 meter
(3 foot) gap... the former feels a lot safer.
Admittedly these streets aren't usually close together (either in
time or space), but I've certainly biked on both.
Still, imperfect data can be better than no data.
analog31 wrote 2 hours 8 min ago:
I wonder if this can be predicted by a heat map of car crashes in
your area. This is based on my private hunch that car crashes
are a predictor of bike crashes. After all, if a car can crash
into another car, or a stationary object such as a tree or a
building, then it can crash into another bike. And the causes may
be similar: Speed and inattention.
On such a map for my locale, the most crash-prone roads are
exactly the ones that I instinctively avoid.
gpm wrote 1 hour 36 min ago:
One potential issue with counting is that crashes aren't
created equal. To reference back to the extremes I discussed
above, if I crash when I'm going 5km/h and it's going 2km/h...
it's fine*. If I crash going 30km/h with a car going 70km/h I
likely have life altering injuries (or am dead, though I
believe the statistics say I'm actually pretty likely to
survive a collision at that speed differential).
I.e. fender benders between cars (and between cars and bikes, I
assume) are common, but not really what we care about.
Not to say it wouldn't be an interesting map to make.
* I've never been involved in a collision, but I assume I'd be
fine at these speeds and any damage minimal.
analog31 wrote 14 min ago:
Indeed, that's a good point. My state maintains a map of
reported crashes, and most of the dots on the map in my
locale are on the highest speed roads. It seems like when the
cars are going slower -- and there are fewer of them -- there
are fewer crashes. And if the severity is less, like you say,
then that's a compounding factor.
We're not NYC, where every street is packed with moving and
parked cars. Most of the traffic is on the faster roads, and
the cyclists tend to thread our way through the sleepy
residential streets. That's good enough separation for me.
The parts of town where bikes have to mix with cars, are
where they focus more attention on bike lanes.
newsclues wrote 3 hours 19 min ago:
Needs Strava integration
stevage wrote 3 hours 24 min ago:
In my area there has been a program for years where you can sign up to
mount a device like this to your bike for pretty much this exact same
purpose. From memory it goes behind your seatpost thougho which seems
less annoying.
yunusabd wrote 3 days ago:
I was curious if the sensor would pick up other things like trees or
other cyclist, but it seems like they accounted for that:
> We then log a sensor events [sic] if the majority of cells in the
sensor frame agree to the same value within a threshold parameter
[...]. This ensures that sensor events are only logged when large
objects like cars block the sensorâs field-of-view , i.e., one or
more small objects like branches or distance pedestrians in the
sensorâs field-of-view will not trigger this condition. While there
is no guarantee that this approach strictly identifies cars, we
empirically saw during testing that passing cyclists and pedestrians
rarely satisfied this condition at the typical passing distance due to
the wide field-of-view of the VL53L8.
Also interesting that it's quite cheap to build:
> The whole system can cost less than $25 [...]
From the paper
URI [1]: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3713325
pj_mukh wrote 3 hours 15 min ago:
So if Iâm in a protected bike lane with a row of parked cars to my
left wouldnât it be flagging every parked car as a potential
hazard?
ben-schaaf wrote 58 min ago:
Unless there's enough distance to the bike lane every parked car in
a row of parked cars is a potential hazard. It's even got it's own
name: dooring.
fwipsy wrote 27 min ago:
I assumed it could tell whether the car was passing you or vice
versa.
davidhyde wrote 2 hours 47 min ago:
From the photos, there appears to be more than one sensor on the
device which may be used to tell which direction the large object
is coming from. Unless you were cycling backwards or mounted the
device the wrong way around you shouldn't have any stationary cars
passing you. Just a guess though.
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