Monday, March 26, 2018

Get Outta My Bike Lane


Last year Nathan Rosenquist released an interactive map which allowed cyclists in New York to submit photographs of cars parked illegally in bike lanes. Cars in Bike Lanes NYC no longer appears to exist but Nathan's code lives on at GitHub.

Nathan's code has been used to create Cars in Bike Lanes Boston and Things in Bike Lanes Denver. The new Things in Bike Lanes Denver map is a joint project from Bicycle Colorado and BikeDenver. They want cyclists in Denver to report obstructions on bike lanes to the interactive map. Adding photos and details of bike lane obstructions to the Things in Bike Lanes map will help Denver Public Works identify areas which are often obstructed. It could also help the city keep bike lanes open for cyclists.

Cars in Bike Lanes (CIBL) is "a browsable geographic database for crowd-sourcing traffic violation reports ... (and) ... can be adapted to document any sort of observable traffic violations within a defined geographic area." So far CIBL seems to have been exclusively used to report obstructions to bike lanes. It obviously could be used in many other contexts as well. I'm sure there are many different ways it could be used to crowd-source citizen concerns to local government.

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