Cycling in the city

High-tech bicycle lights are making cycling safer – and helping authorities to design cities that work better for two-wheeled commuters.

Cycling is good for your health, and good for the environment. In a world where pollution and obesity are becoming increasingly deadly problems, moving around on two wheels seems a no-brainer. And yet, only a very small proportion of the population has embraced it as a daily routine.

In the European Union, for example, on average just 12 per cent of people cycle every day, while 50 per cent go by car and 16 per cent use public transport. (Walking rates are high, but most journeys are too far to be made entirely or largely on foot.)

Cycling data by European country
Cycling numbers versus accidents chart

One way to get more of us on two wheels is to make cycling a key part of city planning – something that can now be done more effectively thanks to new technology which can give much more accurate data on rider behaviour. 

“Cycling data has been the Cinderella at the ball – it’s been left out,” says Irene McAleese, co-founder of See.Sense, which makes high-tech, smart lights for cyclists. “This is an invisible group of people and the risk is that if we don’t get data about how cyclists experience the city, it won’t get planned for and supported.”

Thanks to See.Sense’s connective bicycle lights, city planners now have access to accurate real time data crowd-sourced by a broad range of cyclists. Inspired by mobile phone technology, the lights use sensors to read the environment – including how rough the road surface is and whether there is congestion. Some 40,000 are already in circulation across the UK.

Such insights can then be anonymously aggregated to give an up-to-date picture of cycle routes, behaviours and accident trouble-spots. For cyclists, the advantage is that the lights can read the situation and adapt their brightness and flashing patterns accordingly, maximising battery life and improving safety.

The benefits of embracing cycling are clear, particularly as growing populations put more pressure on the environment and existing infrastructure. If the whole of the EU cycled as much as the bicycle-loving Danes do now, for example, it would cut between 55 and 120 million tonnes of CO2 emitted a year – accounting for up to a quarter of the emission reductions EU has committed to making by 2050 – and cut oil imports by 9 per cent. 

Pollution by transport type

In terms of health benefits, if every Londoner walked or cycled for 20 minutes a day, Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) would save GBP1.7 billion in treatment costs over 25 years, according to Greater London Authority analysis. Statistics also suggest that the more cyclists there are on the roads, the lower the likelihood of a bicycle user being involved in an accident.

Persuading people to cycle takes effort and money, however. In Copenhagen, in addition to 48,000 cycle racks and 429km of bike paths, that includes traffic lights programmed to let cycling commuters to ride a stop-free “green wave” to work and back, there is a dedicated website for reporting potholes and other issues (which – crucially – are then addressed by authorities) and the city has even installed footrests and railings to make waiting at major intersections more comfortable.

Other cities are playing catch-up. London’s mayor Sadiq Khan has pledged to spend GBP770 million on cycling initiatives over his term in office, including new dedicated routes. Paris, meanwhile, is aiming to become the world’s most bikeable city, with plans for 10,000 new two-wheeled parking spaces by 2020.  

The challenge, however, is to know where to build the new cycling infrastructure to maximise its use, and how to improve safety. 

“In the short term we can help a city to look at where the hotspots are: the volume of cyclists travelling through junctions, crashes, delays, near misses that are being reported. That would allow a city to be pro-active, to know which intersections are dangerous before something happens,” explains McAleese. 

“Longer term, the data can be used for planning in terms of what the cycling network looks like in the city and what should it look like – what are the popular routes, where do people actually want to travel as opposed to where we think they might want to travel.”

See.Sense has already been involved in pilot projects with city authorities in Manchester and Dublin, and has now partnered with British Cycling – the UK’s national governing body for cycling – to use the data to improve cycling infrastructure and increase funding for promoting bicycle use. 

“For cities that want to get more people cycling the biggest barrier essentially is the perception of safety. If you can make the experience safer – and also more convenient – that will do the most to remove the barriers,” McAleese says.