Photo: seesense-icon2-cycle-light
London borough gathers cycling data via smart bike lights
13 June 2023
by Christopher Carey
The London Borough of Newham has partnered with cycle tech company See.Sense on a 12-month data-driven project aimed at promoting active travel.
As part of the project, 200 borough residents have been provided with bike lights which can be synched with a smartphone app that sends anonymised data to the council to support its planning on infrastructure improvements.
The sensors monitor the cyclist’s environment up to 800 times per second, providing data on swerving, braking, speeds, dwell times, road roughness and movement patterns. They can also feed into cyclist survey reports.
“The smart cycling project offers a unique opportunity for Newham’s citizens and the council to work together to better understand cycling behaviour and safety in the Romford Road area,” said Martina Gabrielli, senior project manager at the London Borough of Newham.
“This type of data would be difficult to capture by other means, and will really help boost our monitoring and evaluation of the scheme, as well as inform the design and maintenance of Newham cycling infrastructure, improve safety and ultimately enable more people to cycle with data-led evaluation.”
Data-driven
The project will initially support the Romford Road Active Travel scheme, which the council says is central to its 15-Minute Neighbourhood programme.
Data is sent to a See.Sense system to provide insights on popular cycling routes, near-miss incidents, crash events, rapid speed changes, swerving, road surface conditions and average speeds.
It will be aggregated through dashboards for Newham’s highways team to help dentify when and where bike corridor improvements need to be made .
The project received funding from the UK government’s Levelling Up Fund, with the ultimate aim of shifting emphasis away from cars towards active travel.
See.Sense data insights have previously been used by Transport for London to understand collisions and risks to cyclists.
“We’re pleased to work with the London Borough of Newham on this scheme,” said Philip McAleese, CEO of See.Sense.
“Our data can identify issues and evaluate the scheme’s impact in a data-led manner, supporting the shift towards safer and more connected cycling routes.”
Image: See.Sense
