How San Francisco is building bike lanes with the iPhone

Calling all gamers! It’s time for a multiple choice quiz. When you hear about a groundbreaking iPhone application, what springs to mind?

A. Spunky Silicon-Valley start-ups?

B. Teenage hackers?

Or

C. government transportation planners?  

Yep, it’s C—transportation planners may just be the hippest folks in technology trends right now.

KALW’s Nathanael Johnson reports on how San Francisco has found a way to draw on the power of its residents’ smart-phones to make the city a more friendly place to ride a bike.

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NATHANAEL JOHNSON: Billy Charlton’s office on the 26th floor of a Van Ness Avenue building has a great view of San Francisco, but if you turn away from the window and look at his computer, the view of the city is even more interesting.

BILLY CHARLTON: This is basically a stick figure of a representation of the entire Bay Area on my computer screen, and we can zoom in on San Francisco here, and every single street is represented down to the block level, even the alleys are there.

Charlton runs this massive computer model that forecasts the travel patterns for San Francisco, and every one of these little alleys and avenues crowding his screen is linked to information.

CHARLTON: So you can see whether or not it’s one way, whether or not there’s a toll, how many vehicles per hour typically could squeeze into each lane on the street, what type of street it is, just all kinds of information.

Well, not quite all kinds. There’s not a single piece of information available about bicycles, despite the fact that San Francisco has the second highest percentage of people cycling to work of any city in the U.S. There's a reason: there just hasn’t been an easy way to track bicycles – or at least there wasn’t until Charlton and his team had an idea: they realized a lot of these cyclists were riding around with tracking devices in their pockets, tracking devices inside gadgets like the iPhone. The planners thought if they could tap into these smartphones, they could track the routes of their owners.

 CHARLTON: It probably wouldn’t be that expensive to write a little iPhone app to do that, so let’s try it and hopefully it will work.

So that’s exactly what they did. To test it out, I met up with Rob Rynski who works out of his home just north of Golden Gate Park, and goes on a couple of rides there a week. Before he gets on his bike, he pulls out his iPhone and boots up Charlton’s application. It’s called CycleTracks.

ROB RYNSKI: So when you select the purpose of your trip, it’s got a little wheel as they typically do on these iPhone apps: commute, school, exercise, work-related, social, shopping, errand, other, and yeah, I’m one of those folks that does a lot of the exercise and errands at the same time so I’ll just default it to exercise typically unless it’s specifically for that. And then you just click start. The moment you click start it will dim out, you just put it away in your backpack or pocket, and off you go.

JOHNSON: Well, should we take a ride?

RYNSKI: Yes indeed, let’s do that.

Rynski leads me on a circuitous path on the back trails of the park, through redwoods and oak groves, around the model boat pond, the dog run, and finally, just as I’ve lost all sense of direction, we pedal out into the fog at the edge of the continent.

JOHNSON: Alright, here we are out at the ocean. It’s just about 100 yards of visibility, but the GPS should be tracking us right down to the pin point.

When we finally get back to Rynski’s house he pulls out his iPhone again.

RYNSKI: So it’s completed.  So you say, “Okay cool,” and then it will either take you right there – yes –and it will start drawing out the process...

And up pops a street map with every detail of our ride traced in blue. It’s cool, but I could see how some people might be bothered by the idea of the government tracking their every move. That doesn’t seem to bother Rynski, and if anyone should be worried, it’s him. After all, our ride passed right under a half-dozen “no biking” signs.

RYNSKI: I really don't care.

JOHNSON: You’re not worried that the police on horseback are going to track you down and...

RYNSKI: No no no no, not at all. No, what I’m hoping is that the more times I ride these trails the park will say, those damn scofflaws! Or they’ll say, you know what? It’s time. We gotta address the issue of people who actually want to use the park for exercise.

The app's designer, Billy Charlton, says that other cyclists have found creating a more bike-able city outweighs privacy concerns.  

CHARLTON: It’s clear the gamble really paid off because we’ve gotten almost 4000 trips now, from people just volunteering the information.

And that’s a big deal for planners, because up to this point they had to rely on hunches. They had a pretty good idea that cyclists liked bike lanes and didn’t like hills, stuff like that. But now they have quantifiable data, data Charlton can feed into his giant computerized model of San Francisco's streets.

CHARLTON: One of the interesting things about this model is that, it does best when you look at things with trade offs. So, not just can we create a bike lane, but what would happen if we took a lane away from traffic to make a bike lane, or what would happen if we converted a parking lane to a biking lane? We can use this tool to predict with a fair amount of accuracy. What would happen to the traffic?

Of course, all this information is coming from people who can afford smart-phones, but Charlton says that shouldn’t make a big difference.

CHARLTON: We don’t really have any reason to think that people who have iPhones dislike hills more or less than people without iPhones.  

What does worry Charlton is that most of the people who have sent in trips so far are pretty hard-core cyclists. He hopes some people who just bike every once in a while will download the app too, because their routes really could be different.

CHARLTON: If we have as our goal to increase non-motorized travel - biking and walking - that means we have to get people who are currently driving out of their cars. So having information about people who are currently not doing it that frequently would really help us in understanding their needs instead of just understanding the needs of people that bike every day.

So locals have yet to fully settle into the Cycle Tracks saddle. But Charlton says he's getting plenty of positive feedback from other urban planners.

CHARLTON: When this app just came out, the first week, like, my phone was ringing off the hook. With places like Arlington, Virginia, and San Antonio, all over the place. People were like, “Wow! We want to do this, can we use the app too?” No one wanted to be the first penguin to dive in and see if there were sharks underwater. Now that it’s proven it’s possible, I think you are going to see a lot more of these very specific local apps being built for these platforms.

The good news for them is that other cities can use the same app. And Charlton wrote a version for Google’s Android phone and put the code up on the web for others to use and modify however they like.

 

In San Francisco, I’m Nathanael Johnson for Crosscurrents.

This piece originally aired on March 3, 2010.