The BITS Project – Making cycling data available and comparable on a European scale

Abstract

Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) could be the basis for new data driven approaches and mobility applications, as many examples from motorized means of traffic have shown. However, ITS can also contribute to an improvement of the bicycle infrastructure in European cities and to the creation of new data driven innovations that make cycling more comfortable, safe and smart. The EU funded project BITS (Bicycles and Intelligent Transport Systems) was initiated to identify the ITS cycling solutions with the highest potential and to make cycling data available for all interested stakeholders. Until this development stage of the BITS project, ITS for cyclists as bicycle counting, 3D camera systems to detect near accidents, bike sensors to measure air quality and smartphone applications have been implemented and evaluated in the whole North Sea Region (Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, UK). The newly gathered cycling data will not stay inside the project team: To support the further expansion of European cycling networks, one of the main deliverables of the BITS project is an open bicycle data portal, the so called CyclingDataHub (CDH). All interested stakeholders get access to different categories of cycling datasets with an open license and can share their personal cycling data with the general public. The data team of the University of Oldenburg, Department of Business Informatics VLBA, collected and preprocessed all the data sets and published these on a Bicycle Data website. The related Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) should contribute to the improvement of the comparability of the different applications and regions. The harmonization of the different data sets is a big issue as a common understanding of how to collect and to publish cycling data is not established so far on the European scale. Dynamic and static KPIs as well as suitable graphs deliver new insights into bicycle use in Europe. The preprocessed and enriched cycling data can make an important contribution to the further uptake of cycling in the North Sea Region.