On the 25th of April, during the Advisory Group meeting of the MegaBITS project, an interesting discussion took place on Floating Bike Data (FBD).
Casper van Gheluwe of imec (BE) presented the conclusions from their research on FBD, based on interviews and desk research. One of the conclusions was that standardisation of FBD was not (yet) a priority. Members of the Advisory Group and MegaBITS partners agreed that the first priority is to find out how FBD can be used to get insights that support our cycling policies. It became clear that authorities first want to know how it can be used, and what type of FBD is needed per use case. Standards for FBD might not be a priority for cities and regions, but will still be useful. They give clarity on the data and help FBD providers to know what cities and regions need and to eventually share the data.
It became clear that we should not consider FBD in the same way as Floating Car Data (FCD). FBD will never achieve the same penetration level as FCD, and therefore the use cases will be different. But there are numerous use cases in which FBD can be useful, even without having representative data. For example, FBD can give very valuable information about the waiting times at traffic lights and about route choice. And in combination with sensors it can give useful information on for example air quality and the quality of the infrastructure surface. In the next two years MegaBITS will be a test ground for a number of FBD applications, which will show us where FBD provides added value and/or where not.