In order to make sure bicyclists' needs are considered when improving a transportation system, planners and engineers need to know how many people are biking, and where. Traditional bicycle counters can provide data for limited sections of the bike network, often these counters are installed at important locations like trails or bridges. While limited in location, they count everyone who bikes by. Meanwhile, GPS & mobile data cover the entire transportation network, but that data only represents those travelers who are using smartphones or GPS. Combining the traditional location-based data sources with this new, crowdsourced data could offer better accuracy than any could provide alone.

“At ODOT we just adopted "Bicycle Miles Traveled" as a new key performance measure, and we need a way to measure it, so this project very much helps to fill the gap on how we're going to do that. This research used cutting-edge data fusion techniques that could lay the groundwork for how transportation agencies like ODOT monitor bicycle activity across the system.”
-Josh Roll, Research Analyst & Data Scientist at the Oregon Department of Transportation

Learn more about Exploring Data Fusion Techniques to Derive Bicycle Volumes on a Network, led by Sirisha Kothuri of PSU.