Objectives of the service
The product, BIKE™, offers Floating Bicycle Data as a service. It transforms bicycle data collected from GNSS devices into a comprehensive, one-stop access point for all relevant data. This data is crucial for making informed decisions about active mobility from strategic, tactical, and operational perspectives.
Currently, only a few suppliers provide floating data, each with a limited amount of data from specific areas. individually with a small amount of data. This often means that analyses require more data than any single supplier can offer
BIKE™ acts as a brokering ecosystem, aggregating data from suppliers of all sizes to achieve unprecedented coverage and saturation.
When customers purchase data for a specific area, they subscribe to a data stream from all available suppliers in that area. This on-demand service reduces computational and storage overhead. Additionally, customers can request tailored post-processing of the data through the ecosystem.
Users and their needs
The primary customers are municipalities and road authorities with budgets for active mobility investments. Since the pandemic, the focus on cycling has increased significantly. The European Cycling Declaration, which mandates the EU to promote cycling, exemplifies this heightened focus. Consequently, there has been a surge in investments, driving the need for more information on cycling commuters.
To improve traffic conditions, cities and road administrators need data on how bicycles are currently being used, such as in intersections, on bicycle paths, and on main roads. Often, the analyses need more data than a single supplier can provide, so data from multiple suppliers must be combined. This can be a significant obstacle for customers, requiring both data suppliers and customers to invest critical resources in enabling the data, even though this is not their core competence.
The raw data collected from bicycles is processed to provide valuable information like travel times, delays, stops, routes, map issues, and even safety-related insights for active mobility.
Most customers are based in Europe, but there has been interest from other parts of the world as well.
Service/ system concept
Raw floating data is challenging to obtain and process into the useful forms that customers need. Through the BIKE™ ecosystem, customers can access travel times, delays, stops, route choices, comfort measurements, and even map quality assessment.
The BIKE™ ecosystem serves as both a one-stop shop for customers and a one-stop drop for data suppliers. It addresses privacy compliance, processing, tech support, and other challenges, ensuring an efficient and secure data path. Customer configurations are forwarded to the necessary processing link at the supplier’s side, and subsequent aggregation and data fusion provide a single combined source for the customer. This minimises efforts on both ends of the data chain.
Space Added Value
The added value of space for BIKE™ lies in its use of GNSS data on bicycles to provide valuable insights. BIKE™ data includes reported locations with timestamps, which are crucial for its application and value to customers. Without satellite navigation (SatNav), there would be no product or ecosystem, as all reported data is based on locations from a GNSS-based system. Enhancing SatNav precision with High Accuracy Service (HAS) will increase the value of the BIKE™ product. Future use cases for customers will benefit from the addition of satellite Earth observation (SatEO) for generic imagery of infrastructure and landscapes, although this is not within the current scope of the project. The GNSS-based capabilities of the devices on bicycles provide detailed information on bicycle usage, including where and when bicycles are used. This significantly reduces the need for expensive roadside equipment, installations, or surveys that are traditionally used to gather insights on bicycling.
Current Status
Since the start of the project we have participated in several conferences to both represent the BIKE™ ecosystem as well as get a stronger impression of the future capabilities. We have attended:
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ITS World 2024, the largest congress for intelligent transportation systems in the world, where we had a session specifically for Floating Bicycle Data with participants from all over the world.
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Cykeldagene i Viborg, a Danish conference, where we had a presentation on cycling data and interesting discussions with potential Danish stakeholders.
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CIE Summit, Cycling Industries Europe, the trade organisation most relevant for our efforts on this project.
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Mobility Data Days, the NAPCORE conference on data standards for European Data Spaces.
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MegaBITS advisory board presentation.
Currently we are working on technical details and the architecture of the system. We are also working with a specific supplier on an onboarding process with a potential customer.
