PGH Lab 7.0 — Dashcam For Your Bike
An Alternative Mobility Collaboration with City of Pittsburgh’s Department of Mobility and Infrastructure
Dashcam For Your Bike is an app designed to operate as a personal bicycle dashcam. Founder Armin Samii created the app with the goal of helping provide bicyclists with a tool to create and maintain a record of their transit while recording and reporting issues they faced along the way. In order to accomplish this on a city-wide scale, Armin’s PGH Lab proposal focused on working with the Department of Mobility and Infrastructure to allow bicyclists to directly report their experience with the City’s bike lanes.
Whose Data is it Anyway…
Ensuring user privacy and safety was a top priority for both the City team and Dashcam. To that end, the two teams kicked off their collaboration by outlining exactly how personally identifiable information would be protected:
- At no point would any direct user data be provided to City staff, all data would be further protected by the app’s encrypted data reporting processes.
- Data submitted to the City would be cleaned of any identifiable information. Only data relevant to the issue type and submission location would be reported.
By using Dashcam’s app as a hub, Armin was able to create a process that submitted multiple user issues without needing identifiable components and instead could submit all issues to the City with the label “Submitted by Dashcam For Your Bike.”
Downloading the App and Recording Travel…
To use the app, one only needs to download it off their preferred app store and enable the required access to their phone’s camera and microphone. Once permission is given, the user can mount their phone to their bike and record any trip from start to finish, taking mental note of any obstacles or challenges they faced on the way.
At the end of the ride, the user simply reviews the recording, selects the time stamp for any issues they wish to report, then selects the type of issue from a dropdown, and with a simple tap sends the incident to the City of Pittsburgh’s 311 system. Once in the system, a report is generated notifying the proper department or team of the problem, leading to a work order or other needed action. This method of crowdsourced collection and submission is immensely helpful to City staff allowing a more real time look at what issues biking residents are facing.
Submitting Results…
Prior to Dashcam, the City had to rely on workers taking note of issues or hope that residents would use the standard 311 submission system to let City departments know of any existing problems. While this method was effective, to some extent, collecting data directly from the residents using bike lanes allows greater data accuracy on a faster timescale. This will ideally help improve the rate of issue remediation, making residents biking experience more pleasant and safe. With Dashcam For Your Bike’s app users can now submit incidents directly to the City’s 311 service, allowing this high quality data to be crowdsourced directly from the users who would see the greatest impact. Dashcam is helping the City elevate the voice and experience of biking residents.
For anyone interested in the alternate transit future of Pittsburgh and ensuring that it is accessible for all, we recommend giving the app at https://dashcam.bike a try to capture your next transit experience! The problem may seem large, but with accurate data and a little hard work we all can ensure that Pittsburgh’s transit future is a safe one.
The automation of this critical data will help ensure and equitable transit future for the City of Pittsburgh.
PGH Lab 8.0 applications are currently under review. Stay tuned for our next cohort announcement in December 2022.
