Leveraging citizen science to
classify bike lane conditions
using a smartphone app.
bAIcycle
The goal is simple: anyone with the app can ride and instantly classify the state of bike lanes. The Open bAIcycle project aims to use smartphone sensor data to classify the condition of bike lanes. Both road quality and road safety are measured by the app.
The challenge
Open bAIcycle addresses the societal issue of the poor condition of our Flemish cycling paths (comfort and traffic safety) by involving cyclists in generating and labeling the necessary data to train a smart AI (detection and classification) algorithm. The state and design of the Flemish cycling paths has been a long-standing problem, especially in the province of Flemish Brabant. Data shows that the province of Flemish Brabant is the second worst performer when it comes to the condition of the cycling paths.
The solution
By leveraging citizen science everyone can contribute to a better bike lane infrastructure and a more pleasant biking experience overall.
With a smartphone app built by Sentigrate anyone can use their phone to assess the bike lane conditions. The underlying algorithms use the sensor data to create comfort and safety scores. these scores are used to create an overall road quality indicator.
