Tracking bike racks

[HomerJ]

Anyone out there have a similar problem?

I would love to have a totally up to date geographic inventory of bike racks in my fair city, but this is particularly challenging due to instances where people will privately install bike racks without any associated permit process. For years bike racks have been installed without any sort of tracking, so there is a wealth of inventory out there undocumented. I have already made efforts to become more integrated in bike rack tracking for new construction projects, but I am throwing the bigger problem out there to the throbbing brain for input. My office's solution to this problem in the past has been to perform GPS field work, which has worked fine within the downtown area. However, our boundary is far too large and staff is far too small in numbers for this approach to work long term.

What I need is an incentive for people to self-report (something along the lines of free advertising through our FB page, but with a little more pop). Also, if there is an app out there where people can photograph a rack, GPS it, and send it to my office, then I can start to brand the idea as people participating in the planning process. Any other ideas?

Thanks for reading...

[wahday]

There are some cities that have introduced an open source mapping program for bike routes. Why not add a bike rack component to that as well? Or have the racks be a stand-alone project. I think it would be very cool if a user could easily upload a rack location from their phone. In my fair city, they recently rolled out an app for your smart phone that allows you to report things like graffiti, abandoned cars, etc. You launch the app, take a photo and then upload and GPS coordinates are automatically included in the data. This especially useful for graffiti as it is often in weird locations or hard to describe places. Would work great for racks as well.

The open source bike route approach seems to have worked well without any additional incentives. They did expend time and money promoting the program and hiring staff, though, so there definitely was cost involved. One incentive could be for business owners could load their own information to tout themselves as bike-friendly.

This would also be useful for bathroom tracking. Visitors spend an inordinate amount of time trying to track down public restrooms sometimes. I read some article a few years back about some researcher trying to document all the public restrooms in New York, for example.

[Plan_F]

Does your code or ordinance give the business/property owner any bonuses for parking (like less required) for having bicycle parking?

You might try starting with the old-fashion press release and local government newsletter just to let people know that you are looking for the racks. It might help to have a web-form (with pre-determined fields) so that the public or interest groups populate the data fields with what they know or can gather. Smart phones could easily collect a picture and a location (address, lat-long coordinates, maybe PIN, etc.) on the spot.

If the entry point were like a Wikipedia sort of system, the data could come from multiple contributors.

[Veloise]

Those folks can report and tweak your data for you.