Let’s Ride Southall Case Study

Introduction

Let’s Ride Southall is part of the Let’s Go Southall, Ealing Council and Sport England funded programme designed to help get people more active.

The programme is the largest cycling initiative in London giving people access to a bike and a social support network providing opportunities to exercise, build friendships and provide freedom to travel by bike.

The project is distributing 2,500 bikes to adults and children, both new and refurbished as well as adapted bikes.  

Challenge

Let’s Ride Southall had shared the learning from its counterpart project in Essex and had a need to collect high-quality data to demonstrate the impact of the scheme in improving physical activity and supporting economic benefits through cycling.

However, the acquisition of this data posed several significant obstacles. Current market GPS bike trackers are designed primarily for e-bikes, disregarding 'regular' bicycles employed in this project. The alternative of using an app by participants was also untenable.

Thus, a hassle-free solution that required no user involvement was crucial. Also, the project needed a user-friendly method to retrieve and use the data, without imposing an arduous workload for reporting and analysis.

Solution

See.Sense responded to these challenges by supplying patented SUMMIT intelligent cycle trackers for a selection of distributed bicycles.

This device, renowned for its low power consumption, integrates seamlessly with the regular bikes used in this initiative, harnessing power exclusively from the bicycle's dynamo wheel. 

The SUMMIT accurately records the number of rides, distances covered, average speeds, routes taken, CO2 reduction, and active minutes per rider.

In addition to this trip data, the SUMMIT collects rich sensor data at a staggering frequency of 800 times per second.

This comprehensive data includes popular routes, swerving and braking patterns, dwell times, and even road surface conditions, all invaluable for the planning and maintenance of cycling infrastructure.

This GDPR-compliant and anonymised data is delivered to the project via the user-friendly See.Sense dashboard, with customised reports available for in-depth analysis.

Our Data Scientists have worked with the team at Let’s Ride Southall and the London Borough of Ealings’ Highways team to provide sensor data heat mapping to understand where people are riding in the Borough and what issues they face on their routes.   

Results to-date 

Of the first year (2022/23) of bikes to be distributed, almost 250 of those have been fitted with See.Sense SUMMIT trackers and together that have collectively cycled almost 85,000km, evidencing over 400,000 minutes of physical activity and saving over 10,000kg of CO2.   

Providing Metrics on Bike Usage

 Our dashboard provides the following insights:

• Interactive Map of GPS Locations and Stats
• Weekly & Monthly Summary
• Total Stats Per Bike
• Connection Checker for installation  
• Trend Graphs including:
• Active Bikes
• Distance Travelled (km)
• Minutes Active
• No. of Trips
• CO2 Saved (kg)

This allows the programme operators to support participants to increase physical activity and maintain their new cycling behaviours. Let’s Ride Southall are able to see trends each week in riding data and get a birds eye view of the bikes locations that can help in recovering any bikes that are stolen.

Popular Cycle Routes

The image below shows the anonymised and aggregated routes in a heat map to understand where people are traveling, and which are the most popular. These can be filtered by time frame or the number of cyclists using them.  

Cycle Network Safety Analysis

This image is showing heavy swerve events on the network, that is consistent among 3 or more riders at these locations.

We also provide the same data for heavy braking events that the highways teams are using to look at how they can improve infrastructure safety for cyclists.

Amardeep Pal, Project Lead - Let’s Ride Southall shared his experience: 

"The data is helping us to support new riders to maintain their behaviour. See.Sense are helping us to make the most from the data and work with our highways colleagues to understand how to improve infrastructure for our movement of new riders and the local cycling community.

The monitoring data will help demonstrate the return on investment to our funders, and help us to tell the stories of our social movement and the impact on their wellbeing" 

Next Steps 

We have been supporting the team with their data analysis and have implemented additional features to their dashboards to enable them to filter by different bike fleets and also by time frames in order to track changes over time.

We continue to work collaboratively with them to embed behaviour change and are excited to see the potential developments with the Highways team accessing the route and sensor data set to support transport planning. 

Learn More

To find out how See.Sense technology and data services can help with your Vision Zero and road safety target please email team@seesense.cc and a member of our team will be in touch.