CycleSafe: Safe Route Planning for Urban Cyclists

Abstract

Cyclist numbers in major cities are constantly increasing whilst traffic conditions continue to worsen. This poses a major issue for cyclists who attempt to share congested roads with motor vehicles. This paper shows that there is not enough work being done to improve the safety of cyclists on the road, and proposes a solution to this problem in the form of a route planning application. Current cyclist route planning applications do not take safety factors like traffic, rain or visibility into account when providing cycle routes. We use Auckland city as a case study to explore our solution. The traffic and weather data in Auckland are acquired by using Google, Bing and Wunderground APIs. An evaluation of our solution shows that our system successfully implements a route planning application that routes users away from unsafe traffic conditions, thus improving cyclist safety.