Biking in cities is an increasing trend. In Boston’s long term mobility plan “Go Boston 2030,” their goal is to increase biking fourfold. The city’s transportation department has a Bikes team dedicated to “making bicycling fun, safe, and convenient.” This team is in charge of planning and designing streets, managing the bike share program, and organizing programs to educate the community on bike safety.
In 2017, Boston was among the first large cities to launch a bike share program. The Blue Bikes program has made biking fun, fast, and affordable to city residents. Since 2017, Boston has seen an addition of more than 210 stations, 2,200 bikes, and over 6 million trips taken..
The City of Boston conducted a study in 2017 that revealed hotspots for bikers in the city, as shown on the left. We used these locations as reference points to drive our analysis. It was interesting to learn that the most popular location is the Massachusetts Ave Bridge with 4,321 bikers a day!
What is the current state of biker safety in Boston?
With the increasing numbers of bikers in the city, we want to see how the existing infrastructure is supporting biker safety. Specifically, where are bike lanes located? Are there relationships between crash hotspots and bike lane placements?
Our goal was to explore this topic and offer a proposal to city planners based on our findings.
Anywhere with bike lanes is fantastic, everywhere else feels super dangerous, especially when riding in a car lane.
Jon
Casual BikerThe roads are so crowded and the cars don't necessarily obey the bike lanes, so I feel on edge until I get out of the city.
Melissa
Casual BikerDrivers are oblivious
Mat
Avid BikerOne car ran me off the road because they really wanted to pass me.
Mike
Frequent BikerMass Ave used to make me feel unsafe before it was redone...
Audrey
Casual BikerI would feel much more safe on Huntington if there were designated bike lanes
Ashna
Frequent BikerFor our project we collected data from two primary sources and conducted our analysis in RStudio with several libraries.
Who? Vision Zero is a subgroup of Boston's Transportation Department. Their mission is to "focus the City’s resources on proven strategies to eliminate fatal and serious traffic crashes in the City by 2030." Vision Zero collects and reports statistics on motor vehicle, bike, and pedestrian crashes throughout the city.
Data The data obtained through vision zero provided us with details on 17,361 instances of crashes throughout the 2015-2018 time period. Useful fields in the dataset included: time of day, mode type(car, bike, ped), and location(lat, lon). We further filtered the dataset to focus primarily on crashes involving bikers.
Who? Analyze Boston is the City's open data portal. They provide a wide range of public data with the mission of making information "easy to find, access, and use by a broad audience." Specifically, we focused on their data related to the placement and locations of bike lanes throughout the City.
Data The bike lane data collected through Analyze Boston provided us with a spatial representation of the location of bike lanes in Boston. This allowed us to import the spatial dataset into RStudio to overlay on a map for visual data analysis.
Who? RStudio is a free open-source integreated development enviornment. As stated in their mission, they aim to provide professionals with software that allows for "robust and reproductive data analysis." R's active user community provides a variety of useful function through libraries.
Analysis RStudio was our first resource for performing in-depth data analysis utilizing the crash and bike lane datasets. Our work was supported by the following packages:
Who? Leaflet is a JS library used for creating interactive maps. It contains features for plotting points on maps, creating cluster maps, working with GeoJSON layers, and much more. We utilized leaflet for R initially, then transitioned over to JS code for the webapp.
Maps Leaflet makes it very easy to create interactive maps with various views. We used the OpenStreetView as the base map and then overlayed various features such as markers, clusters, heatmaps, etc. We played around with changing the marker colors to represent different visualizations which you saw above (year, season). We were also able to use it to bring in the shape file of bike paths in Boston which we used to further our analysis of which areas need improvement in the city.
Toggle through the various maps to see how we explored our data. Bike lanes are represented with black lines. If a map is having difficulty loading, try resizing the page.
We recognize that creating more bike lanes is a big undertaking. We think there are other methods to help improve safety!
After examining our data, we thought about various actions that could be taken to improve bike safety in Boston. Our proposal is broken down into a system of four tiers. Simply deciding to add bike lanes on streets without them could be a solution with high impact, but it's also a big undertaking for the city with high costs associated with the planning, design, and implementation (both time and money).
Our model includes additional methods with potentially less cost that may help enhance Boston’s bike scene. Our proposed action plan can be utilized by the city to categorize high traffic biking areas and crash hotspots into four levels of severity. In using this system, they city can make gradual improvements based on the resources they have available. We also recognize that there are streets such as Mass Ave and Columbus Ave. with preexisting bike lanes that still suffer crashes. We believe that with the addition of some of these other measures, this will help alleviate instances of crashes and aid in creating a safer Boston for drivers, bikers, and pedestrians. The four tier levels are further explained in the next section and are ranked in terms of impact to the city as well as their cost levels.
Our investigation has highlighted certain streets we think would benefit from more bike lanes:
We recognize that more people bike in the warmer months, and think that a potential way to create bike lanes is to add temporary safety measures along roads to create bike lanes.
COST: MEDIUM IMPACT: MEDIUM/HIGHOur qualitative data highlighted the fact that many bikers feel unsafe due to fast driving cars in popular bike areas (such as downtown).
We think that a potentially cheaper way to help bikers is to propose slower speed limits in higher traffic
From personal experience we have noticed that there are clear road markers indicating bike lanes, however, we don't necessarily think that drivers will pay the best attention to something that is directly in front of them on the road as they are paying attention to driving. We propose that increased signage that is more in line with a driver's eye could be helpful in increasing awareness about shared bike lanes, the amount of bikers in the area, etc.
COST: LOW IMPACT: LOWIf we had all the time and resources in the world we would love to obtain access to real-time data and create an interactive map of bike accidents, traffic patterns, and use it to help bikers optimize their routes to and from a place. By using real-time data we can make our predictions and recommendations of routes/areas to be improved more precise. More accurate and timely data would further aid us in helping both bikers and the city of Boston. We would also like to distinguish between recreational vs. frequent bikers and help different types of bikers plan their routes based on their preferences.
With the recent additions of the Mass. Ave. bike lanes as well as the Columbus Ave. lanes, we want to examine whether the addition of these lanes have actually had an impact on the number of crashes that occur over the next few years. We think it would be useful to be able to differentiate between pedestrian/bike accidents and get a better understanding of the party that may have cause the accident, and use this information to guide proposals on where improvements can be made.
Bikers of Boston
Hey there! I am a 4th year, CS major. I currently own a bike and use it to get to and from campus just about every day. I've had my fair share of biking through frigid Boston days, but I still love having a bike!
Project Role: I worked on creating visualizations in R with leaflet, which we then transitioned over to JavaScript.
Hello! I'm a 5th year Computer Science and Business Administration major. I love biking in Boston on a warm summer day! Some of my favorite places to visit include the Charles River along the Esplanade as well as taking longer rides to the Arnold Arboretum.
Project Role: I worked on visualizations we did in R with leaflet as well as parts of the data analysis.
Hi! I'm a 4th year Computer Science major, graduating this May. After getting hit by a car on my way to work, I'm currently on a small bike hiatus. I still love biking and the freedom it gives you!
Project Role: I worked on the transition of our code from R to JavaScript as well as our analysis of the data.