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.

  • cubism_pitta@lemmy.world
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    24 days ago

    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

    • Showroom7561@lemmy.ca
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      23 days ago

      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.

      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

      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.

      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.