As part of our work to help cycling and the bike industry into the world of smart, connected and shared mobility we are working with visionaries and leaders who are setting the tone in this new mobility. We are going to be inviting some of them to share their thoughts and visions with ECF.com in the coming months.

Benedicte Swennen is Urban Mobility and Cities Policy Officer here at ECF. She manages the Cities for Cyclists network and works in close collaboration with city officials for the promotion of cycling as a mode of transport in urban environments.

There is a lot going on around Smart Cities and ECF and the Cycling Industry Club is working on Smarter Cycling too. Some cities are already testing the solutions of our industry partners, and there might also be an opportunity for Cities for Cyclists members to get involved! One of our very promising cycling industry members is See.Sense, a fast growing company that works on smart bicycle lights and even connected bicycles.

What is a smart bicycle light? It is a device that can not only give light, but also has sensors that take up information about the temperature, the surface of the road, the light around you, the speed you travel at, the density of cycling traffic – it is not finished yet! – the crashes and near miss accidents, and in the near future, also the pollution level. Amazing how many things you can do with a single light!

Milton Keynes, a town in the South-East of England of almost 230.000 inhabitants, is undertaking a project with See.Sense to map their cycle paths - not only where are they are, but also what condition are they in and how cyclists are using them - in order to eventually make a well-weighted decision about where to plan their future cycle infrastructure, including a significant investment in 'cycle highways'. The data that is collected through the See.Sense smart lights, feeds into the overall city’s data hub and will allow the data to integrate with a diverse range of transportation and mobility data with real time feeds of activity. This will, it is hoped, provide a real time journey planning capability that is ready to launch in 2017. 

In Dublin, Ireland's capital, with over 500.000 inhabitants, smarter cycling is an important asset to make Dublin more cycle friendly and eventually increase their cycling mode share from 8% to 25% by 2030. See Sense have won the opportunity to work with Dublin via their "Smart Dublin cycling challenge” and as a result they are developing a new tracking device that will provide a ‘find your iphone’ like capability using LPWA and GPS, allowing cyclists to easily track their stolen bike anywhere across the city, without draining their phone battery and at low cost. At the same time, their patent-pending use of sensor technology enables the crowdsourcing of real-time and unique cycling data about cyclist’s journeys over a wide range of variables. Two variants will be created - one for use on personal bikes and one for integration into city bikes alongside their ICON intelligent bike light. The city bike version will additionally include pollution sensors. See.Sense have already begun to work together with public bike share company Nextbike and IT-company CISCO to develop a demonstrator of their city bike tech. 

Besides promotion of cycling and design of cycle paths, there are numerous other ways of putting the smart cycling products of See.sense to good use for bicycle policy in cities:

• Cost-effective maintenance of your cycling infrastructure: detect potholes before they are formed
• Safer cycling: redesign infrastructure before serious crashes happen
• Social aspects: want to make women cycle more in your city? Start by checking if there is safe lighting everywhere along the cycle paths
• Sharing data back with cyclists through their app to help cyclists plan journeys to avoid dangerous 'hotspot' or polluted areas 
• … The sky is the limit!

See.Sense is keen on putting their intelligent and connected products to the test in real life circumstances, and for different purposes. They are waiting for your call and we at ECF are waiting to hear all about the results of smart cycling in our Cities for Cyclists! 

Are you curious about the work ECF is doing on Smart Mobility and Smarter Cycling?