BikeVibes: An app for crowdsourcing open road quality data from a cyclist perspective.

ABSTRACTThis paper presents BikeVibes1, an app that cyclists can use to log data regarding the smoothness of their rides. The main goal of BikeVibes is to facilitate the collection of anonymized open data about road quality that others can download and peruse. A few sample scenarios where having this type of crowdsourced data would be useful are as follows. A city can use the gathered data in order to determine which roads need to be maintained/upgraded since the quality of the road can be perceived very differently when riding a bike compared to driving a car. Likewise, a city can determine paths that are more frequently used by cyclists in order to decide where to build or upgrade dedicated bike lanes and/or how to prioritize maintenance. Also, third-party app developers can use the road quality data to suggest paths to cyclists based on smoothness, as this may be an important attribute for some people, e.g., in the case of parents riding bicycles hauling trailers with children. None of these scenarios could be easily contemplated without the availability of data such as that gathered through BikeVibes.