SCC-CVIC-PG Track A: Enabling Safe, Community-wide Bike-to-Work Strategies via Participatory Sensing

This university-community collaboration aims to advance the state-of-the-art in active and sustainable mobility for commuters. The project seeks to use innovative ecosystems of smartphone based technologies to grow and sustain communities of bicycle commuters that ride to work together in both ad hoc and regular groups, improving mobility while working around limitations of current transit infrastructure in Los Angeles, a region ranked as having the highest commute-related worker stress levels in the nation.

This project uses smartphone-based participatory sensing, photojournaling, ad hoc group route planning, and dynamic visualizations suitable for community spaces that together help individuals overcome barriers to bike commuting, including perceived safety risks. The proposed solution works around and intends to inspire the necessarily slower changes to city infrastructure needed to address the “spatial mismatch” of housing and workplace locations, addressing the effects of that mismatch through gains in transportation “satisfaction” over the otherwise dominant lens of “efficiency.” In this planning effort, the project team of university researchers and community organizations will work with residents, workers, employers, and service organizations to address research questions necessary to prepare a prototype implementation for our study area, including gathering information on bicycling ownership and practices, barriers to bicycling to work, costs of transportation and housing, employer support for bikeshare programs, willingness to make tradeoffs to ride in groups, existing community relationships and structures, collective identity dynamics, smartphone penetration, and the potential role of smartphone based participatory sensing technology.

Results of this project will include the research agenda and evaluation metrics for a Stage 2 project that demonstrates how mobile smartphone support for group commuting by bicycle can turn a commute into a safe, productive, fulfilling and sustainable time investment, reduce vehicle miles traveled (VMT), and directly address many of the challenges posed in the program solicitation.

This project combines community-led training with a modest but innovative ecosystem of cloud-supported smartphone tools, such as privacy-preserving automatic route documentation, data-driven ad hoc group formation and planning of emergent group bike routes, facilitated digital journaling and exhibition that involves groups and the larger community in journaling their process of “becoming a bicyclist”, evolving digital self-portraits of the groups (and larger biking community) available on mobile devices and the web, and a public feed of de-identified safety and satisfaction incidents. Critical to our approach is this use of creative expression and self-documentation to enhance feelings of identity and sustain the groups brought together by the systems we envision.

The collaboration addresses spatial mismatch by demonstrating that a cycling based approach can treat the "mismatch" “symptoms” more productively and more immediately than the underlying structural conditions and at lower cost by making bike-to-work a compelling and satisfying alternative. Then, this experience can drive more significant infrastructural change to support biking itself and contribute to the civic conversation around better models for full commute and “first mile / last mile” public transit options in the longer term.

This project is supported by the CIVIC Innovation Challenge program Track A. Communities and Mobility: Offering Better Mobility Options to Solve the Spatial Mismatch Between Housing Affordability and Jobs through a collaboration between NSF and the Department of Energy Vehicle Transportation Office.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.