PING if you care !

Nice to meet you! My name is PING!
I give cyclists the opportunity to communicate and engage directly with the city-administration in order to make cycling more comfortable and safer.

Hello, how are you today?
Exploring a city by bike is quick, cheap and healthy. And, most of all, it is fun!
Your city wants to be more cycling friendly, with a cycle network that is expanding all the time, with marked and signed bike routes, with new facilities and implementing, among other things, priority zones for cyclists at traffic lights? That’s great indeed! But who is actually deciding on what is the best for cyclists? Are they involved in this decision finding?

I have good news for you!
I offer a direct and transparent way to foster the communication between citizens and city officials. Through a unique campaign, I offer a platform to actively engage in the improvement of the city.
But, before I continue, may I introduce myself? My name is PING. PING if you care! As soon as a cyclist has received me, they can download the Bike Citizens app for free and pair it with me. When starting the cycling route, the app is activated and ready to start collecting PINGs. Every time a user wishes to share a cycling-experience, may it be
a positive impression, such as a route or place with high quality, or helping to improve infrastructure, they simply click me to mark that exact point on a map that is provided by the Bike Citizens app. And after completion of the trip, participants have the possibility to provide additional feedback via this app. They can do this immediately, after finishing the route or at any later stage.

In the next step, each marked spot can be edited by matching it with different categories. The marked locations and feedback are reviewed and set into correlation with overall cycling data of the
city. In this way, it allows to point out issues right away, and it allows for easier communication between the citizens and the city administration. And don’t be afraid, all the data is safe! For statistical purposes, only anonymised data will be used when analysing the tracking and PING data.

Changing cycling policy at the push of a button
My friends are working with an analytics tool that has so many features, you can’t image. Combining the PINGs with overall cycling data of your city. Compare the speed of a cyclists with
the marked PINGs. Identifying underlying and objective causes for the subjective sense of insecurity. Analysing how sociodemographic variables and bicycle-related person variables
are related to PING behaviour. Do women, for example, PING other issues than men? Do experienced cyclists PING different than less experienced cyclists? What about the e-bikers? What is
their sense of insecurity? Are they PINGing more? Or different? Why, and for what reasons, are some routes less used? Are they unsafe, uncomfortable, or simply not the shortest way?
The eventual goal of this project is not to immediately fix, for example, potholes, but to combine all the issues that cyclists face, in order to create a bigger picture. At the end of the campaign,
Mobiel 21 and Bike Citizens analyse all the data received and offer short, medium and long-term recommendations to the city officials to improve the cycling […]