Everyone who currently rides a bike in Los Angeles has mapped out a network of streets that are pleasant to bicycle on. Imagine if we could easily map out this network and have it be easily accessible to people who may not yet know where these good spots are to ride.  

Also, if we could visually see the routes that cyclists actually ride on a regular basis, we could target those streets for more strategic infrastructure improvements like transforming a residential street with a lot of stop signs into a bicycle boulevard that has traffic circles at intersections instead.

A few months back, I ran into some researchers at UCLA Center for Embedded Networking Systems working on developing a technology called Biketastic that uses cell phones to track bicycle rides.  Excited about the potential of this being a tool, I volunteered to help test this new program in its development stage.

Nearly 150 rides later, I’ve mapped out all of the routes I ride on a regular basis.  Below is a snapshot of one section of the overall map.  As you can see, the streets I bicycle on are sometimes streets with a lot of traffic, but often quieter side streets with less traffic. 

The researchers at Biketastic are almost ready to launch a test run where more folks track their rides.  If you are interested in helping launch this and track your rides, please email me.