Predicting Perceived Cycling Safety Levels Using Open and Crowdsourced Data

Jiahui Wu, Lingzi Hong, Vanessa Frías-Martínez

Abstract: Cycling communities have been related to lower obesity rates and lower stress levels. Nevertheless, one of the main obstacles to increase ridership in cities is the lack of information regarding perceived cycling safety at the street level. City planners have typically used extensive road network and traffic information to approximate cycling safety levels. However, this approach requires the deployment of expensive sensors thus making it hard for many cities to get access to accurate cycling safety maps. In this paper, we evaluate several methods to predict urban cycling safety at the street level, exclusively using public information from open and crowdsourced datasets. We evaluate the proposed approach in the city of Washington D.C. and achieve F1 scores of 66%, 70% and 88% when five, four or three different cycling safety levels are considered.