The Love to Ride Blog

Creating a more bike friendly world

At Love to Ride, our mission is to enhance cycling safety and enjoyment worldwide. By harnessing cutting-edge data from our new app and mapping tools, we provide real-time, crowd-sourced insights that empower communities to make informed, effective decisions for better and safer bicycling infrastructure.

These new tools were designed with the pressing needs of transportation professionals in mind. Our goal was simple: support planners with tools that optimize decision-making and investment and make biking safer and better for all.



 

The problem: the lack of comprehensive data

The current state of biking data is troublesome:

  • 30% of all bike rides are 2 miles or less, but these trips are not recorded using traditional methods (census, surveys, physical counters)
  • Common biking apps require a rider to manually record each bike ride, and as a result few people record all their trips
  • The lack of reliable, comprehensive data makes it difficult to understand the safety and infrastructure needs of your community

 

The solution: the new Love to Ride app and data mapping tool

The new Love to Ride app and data mapping tool provide critical insights needed to make better investment and infrastructure decisions. Using this groundbreaking technology, together we're able to make our communities better for biking.

Investments in targeted bike infrastructure directly impact the quality of life in our communities. What sets Love to Ride data apart is its high provenance—it is not a synthesized dataset but instead represents a diverse cross-section of real-world data on both human-rated route data and individual behavior/demographic data.

This information not only provides actual insights into where and how much biking is taking place but also who is biking, why, and what their experience is. This analysis of community usage provides crucial decision support for making optimal and equitable infrastructure investments.

This new solution includes: 

  • Automatic Ride Logging: the app automatically detects and logs all bike rides so you collect 9 x more data, based on 10 meter increments
  • Safety Ratings Map: identify hotspots and prioritize investments while making a compelling case to stakeholders
  • Heat Maps: understand infrastructure usage, use volume and safety data to optimize investments
  • Dashboard for Planners & Engineers: plan for equity with demographic filters and views. Benchmark and measure network improvements

 

2 minute video overview of the key features for planners

 

 

A deep dive into the planner tools

1.Automatic Ride Logging

The app automatically detects and logs all bike rides so you collect 9.3 x more data, based on 10 meter increments.bike route

 

2.Comfort and Safety Ratings

Screenshot 2024-04-15 at 1.24.07 PM

 

3. Heat Maps

The Love to Ride platform provides community heat maps and the ability to export aggregated trip data for use on platforms such as ArcGIS.

Site admins are able to see all the trips riders are making.

Filters enable advanced segmentation (gender, age, ethnicity, rider confidence level, time frame etc).

👯 Crowd sourced data, showing how everyday people really ride

🗾 Community heatmap visualisation with segmentation

💽 Aggregated data export options for off-platform work

Screenshot 2024-04-15 at 1.23.58 PM

 

4. Insights Dashboard

Screenshot 2024-04-15 at 1.23.03 PM

 

5. An example of segmentation and data produced

planner segments

Screenshot 2024-04-15 at 3.10.29 PM

 

A deep dive into the rider experiencehandheld-1

1. Automatic trip logging

The app makes bike trip data collection automatic, easy, and rewarding (think Fitbit).

No need for a rider to open the app, press start, or press stop.

As a result, 9.3x more bike rides are recorded, including short trips for transportation.

 

 

2. Rate My Routes

 After each ride, riders can rate how safe and comfortable they felt on each route.

 

3. Additional rider features:

     ☝🏼 Review the ride and add a purpose

     🔥 Enjoy viewing insightful & motivating heat maps

     💨 See their streaks, which encourages more activity

     📆 View which days of the week they've ridden

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Motivational home screen with challenge info and news
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Rides and all trips screen

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Detailed bike trip screen
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Detailed other modes screen
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Personal rider heat map

current features

 

 

 

 


 

 

We're excited to see the impact these tools can have on making biking safer and better in communities around the world!

Eager for more? Select an option that fits your needs:

1. Download the new app to track rides and rate your comfort levels

2. Read more about the Make Every Ride Count initiative designed to make biking better in your community

3. Join the Bike Month (May) challenge

4. Book a call and discover how to easily integrate this tool into your ecosystem

        or just fill out the form below and we'll be in touch!


Published on: 1, Oct 2024

Interested in working together? Get in touch.