Know Before You Go: Bike Mapping at SPAR Lab

Biking has become a cultural marker of the UC Santa Barbara community, and Dr. Trisalyn Nelson along with the brilliant minds at SPAR Lab are working to ensure the safety of this sustainable transportation method.

Many UC Santa Barbara students embrace cycling as their primary form of transportation, and the Spatial Pattern Analysis and Research Lab, or SPAR Lab, has the data to support this claim. Through the employment of a bicycle counter, SPAR can record the number of bicycles that pass through a given location. On January 9th of this year, SPAR set a clear tube bicycle counter along the El Colegio bike path in front of San Clemente Villages. In just one day, the counter recorded over 14,900 bicycle trips! With this quantifiable data, SPAR can recommend infrastructure and program improvements to government officials and the local community.

SPAR Lab has partnered with Santa Barbara City, County, and County Association of Governments to provide information on unsafe cycling hotspots. SPAR’s reports are crucial as data for cycling is lacking. Lizzy Schattle, SPAR’s Communication Manager, explained how only 20% of bicycle crashes are reported to the police and almost no near-misses are reported. SPAR is working to fill these gaps through geographic information system analysis and crowdsourcing data.

SPAR Lab Director, Dangermond Endowed Chair of Geography, and avid bicyclist, Dr. Trisalyn Nelson, created a global crowdsourcing bicycle web map, BikeMaps.org, to inform cyclists of hazardous hotspots on their routes. BikeMaps displays hazards, bicycle rack locations, areas of reported theft, and more to help inform cyclist’s decisions. Bicyclists can drop a pin on the map, reporting their collisions or near-misses to help warn and protect local cyclists. Through this data, SPAR has concluded dangerous areas to prioritize for bicycle infrastructure improvements. Relevant data found that the most high-risk cycling area in Goleta is on Hollister and in Santa Barbara on Upper State street.

With the success of BikeMaps.org, SPAR Lab has expanded to include data from Strava, a popular fitness-tracking app, to quantify ridership in a given area. This data helps scale findings and understand percentages of collisions. While some bias may be present with crowdsourcing and data collection from tracker apps, SPAR is working to decrease bias through additional outreach for BikeMaps.org and by using geographic methods to bias-correct the data they do have.  As data collection evolves, SPAR has crafted a focus on Santa Barbara County through the ongoing development of an Active Transportation Dashboard. This Dashboard will provide data to support cycling infrastructure, complete grant applications, and reduce vehicle miles traveled through new programming.

The SPAR Lab and BikeMaps team have created a system for local cyclists to contribute to the safety and sustainability of their community. As a thriving cycling campus, UCSB students and staff can know before they go, with the opportunity to plan routes intentionally and limit the threat of collision or theft. SPAR Lab has reinvented how we understand safety and cycling, proving that there are innovative solutions to decrease risk and promote sustainability within the transportation sector.