Studies have shown that many people don’t commute by bike due mainly to a fear of being hit by cars. A new bike-mounted proximity sensor has been designed to help such folks, by objectively telling them which streets are the safest for cyclists.
Studies have shown that many people don’t commute by bike due mainly to a fear of being hit by cars. A new bike-mounted proximity sensor has been designed to help such folks, by objectively telling them which streets are the safest for cyclists.
I would assume they are referring to the Strava heat map which will give you an idea of which areas are most popular to cyclists.
There are a few caveats, however.
The first one is that sometimes people forget to turn off their Strava session and so their trip may be recorded while they’re in a car or bus or train.
Another issue that I’ve seen, especially on really busy roads that appear to be popular to cyclists, is that people will be using sidewalks so it gives you the wrong idea of whether the route is actually safe enough.
Thats a good point and yes I was talking about heat map.
I think in order for that to happen (in a bigger city) a large number of people would have to make that same mistake fairly regularly.
With regards to sidewalks, yeah there is no indication that riding a sidewalk is more preferred to riding on the street for a route. That said in most cities / states I believe riding on sidewalks is illegal.
In California there is no state law so whether you are allowed to is determined by the city
I can only speak for publically available hotspots without paid subscriptions like RidewithGPS or Strava, and there are quite a few “cyclists” who are obviously not, showing up on the heatmap.
I think that there needs to be some kind of logic in how they process the data. If a “cyclist” is going 80km/h, the software should assume this isn’t a cyclist. LOL
This is a grey area, for sure.
In my municipality, riding on the sidewalk is permitted, while all surrounding municipalities in the region ban it.
But even in those cases, I think most cyclists might opt for a sidewalk (illegal or not), just to be safer than on some hostile roads. I don’t blame them, either.
When I see a stretch of road on a cyclist heatmap that I know to be dangerous, I try to zoom in to see if the heatmap path is actually on the road or sidewalk, and usually you can tell that they are riding on the sidewalk.