I’m a student working with some clients, and we’re trying to build a plan to help out the city by providing valuable data, analyzed and organized. They’ve decided they want to try to provide more data about where people like to bike and walk to help the city focus their resources.
The clients really like the idea of using GPS data on smartphones to track where and when people are biking or walking. They are sure that they can do this very accurately. The issue is figuring out how to get people to provide this data. They want to build an app, SafetyPin is the working title, but we need to figure out how many people would download it and how to get more cyclists to download it.
We’re trying to collect data right now and we need more people to take a survey, but it seems I'm not allowed to post links right now. It's so hard to get survey responses DX.
Perhaps most importantly, I’d like to open up a discussion as well. What kind of ideas do you have that might help us? What do you think will be the biggest obstacles for us to worry about?
I’m really interested in what people think about this.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
One of the selling points we think we have is that, with data collected, we could show routes and paths that are LESS popular. Most routing applications either don’t track usage or make a point of routing you through more highly used paths. This idea of providing wayfinding with the app seems to creep a bit into something else though. I’m not sure if it’s an issue that we’d be contaminating any traffic data by also rerouting that traffic at the same time. That might make it less useful to the city, which was our original plan. Still, it seems like something a lot of people would value.
Another concern that I personally have is privacy. A lot of people are starting to become conscious of this, and I’m glad about that. However, the more we talk about ideas for this project, the more personal information it seems we might want to take from users. The design for the app would already know exactly where you are at all times. Now we’re talking about getting emails from users for marketing purposes though. Is this too much?
I think the best marketing idea we should focus on is partnerships. One idea was to get local bike shops to provide discounts to people who use the app. I’m not sure what kind of things we could provide to the bike shop in return though. Another idea might be to have marathoners and racers download the app. Maybe spectators could track them or race maintenance would be able to quickly see problems. I don’t know the intricacies of how these things work though, so I’m not sure how realistic this is. Most bike shops around here seem to be chains, so we’d have to find someone really important to talk to.
One of my personal concerns is the size of the app. It seems like app developers don’t care about this, but I have no space on my phone for any app at all! I think I’m a unique case though.