The Wisconsin Department of Transportation awarded $75,000 to Xiao Qin for a 10-month project to use crowdsourced data to estimate bicycle volumes on roadways statewide. Qin is a Lawrence E. Sivak ’71 professor of civil & environmental engineering in UWM’s College of Engineering & Applied Science and director of the university’s Institute for Physical Infrastructure and Transportation.
Wisconsin currently does not have a systematic way to glean bicyclist activity on specific roads, although it is key to improving safety and prioritizing infrastructure improvements.
Team will use popular apps among cyclists to ID Wisconsin’s most dangerous roads
Working with UWM’s Robert Schneider, professor, urban planning, Qin will use crowdsourced data from popular smartphone apps including Strava and CycleTracks. Cyclists use such apps to map and log their routes and can make the information public.
Qin and Schneider will pair the crowdsourced data with land-use and socio-economic data to develop two tools: a roadway-segment level bicycle volume prediction model and a bicycle ridership map.
By integrating bike data with motor vehicle crash data involving bicycles, bicycle injury risk also will be analyzed and mapped, including the identification of the most dangerous roadway segments for cyclists.
Crowdsourced data could improve safety
Traditional bike data collection methods are expensive, labor intensive and time-consuming, Qin said. By comparison, crowdsourced data collection could provide cost-effective, broad geographic coverage of bicyclists’ activity. It has been used by several other state departments of transportation to analyze bicyclists’ route choice behavior, bicycle count distributions, and bicycle safety, Qin says.
Bicycling has gained popularity in Wisconsin but presents safety concerns for riders on public roadways. Statistics from 2017-2021 show that 1.29% of bicycle crashes are fatal and 10.58% produce serious injuries. Improving safety for non-motorists is one of the top 10 priorities listed in the Wisconsin Strategic Highway Safety Plan, which includes all roadways in the state.