From People to People - The Self-Benefit of Crowdsourced Cycling Data as Part of the European Cycling Challenge

The European Cycling Challenge (ECC) is a team competition among urban cyclists that takes place every year May, 1-31. Born in 2011 in Bologna as a small test within the CIVITAS Mimosa Project, the ECC is now an event joined every year by thousands of cyclists all around Europe. The ECC applies the gamification approach to daily commuting. In 2016, the fifth edition, 52 European cities joined the Challenge, from 17 different countries. 46.000 people cycled 4.000.000 km in a month, producing a huge amount of GPS data that are shown as live cities’ heatmaps during the ECC and used by cities to assess user needs and for the cycling planning activities. ECC has been rewarded twice in 2013 and 2016 with the CIVITAS Award as the best communication initiative and for its novel use of online applications in order to assess user needs. Since the more cyclists join a team, the more chances a city has to win the Challenge (and the more GPS data are collected), each city implements its best local communication strategy to involve the highest number of people. ECC created a fun environment at local and international level, able to facilitate new partnerships between cities, new local groups (NGOs, advocacies, etc.), a countless number of linked events and to trigger behaviour changes among commuters. Crowdsourced GPS data have multiple effects in participating cities and most of the effects are eventually a direct benefit for the same people that produced those data. One important step to reach those effects is to build on research results. There have been different research approaches at local level: applied researches on pure data, GIS mapping and paths assessment, physical infrastructure safety checking and cross matching with GPS data, thesis on cyclists’ behaviour, etc. This paper describes 3 use cases from Bologna and Rome in which cycling GPS data are exploited for the self-benefit of city users, in a virtuous circle, according to the fact that the analysis of cycling flows is made available by cyclists themselves