#Zephyr Proposal ##How a mobile app can help put wheels on the road
###Bicyling should be a right The bicycle is the perfect vehicle. It is elegant, lightweight, affordable, maintainable, useful, and most of all, enjoyable. There's no end to great bicycle quotes from some of the brightest human minds. The reason being is simply because a bike is a beautiful thing and should be enjoyed by anyone on an any day.
Commuting by bicycle is known to help mental ability, increase happiness, improve physical condition, and help environmentally just to list a few positives. Communities that have a higher bicycle commuting population are proven to be intrinsically safer too. I believe that it's in our best interest to encourage cycling on a utilitarian level.
###Our issue at hand Austin is a fantastic city. Character, culture, a laundry list of experiences to be had, and largely acceptable weather are a few reasons why the Capital of Texas is consistently on people's minds. People visit and never want to leave. Add in a strong economy with a booming tech sector and you get one of the fastest growing cities in the US. Austin's average temperature is just south of 70 degrees with nearly 300 sunny days a year, creating an enjoyable outdoor space and a healthy city. Because of the mild climate and relatively small urban corridor, many Austinites would like to commute by bicycle. But there's a problem.
Austin's rate of growth has created an unsustainable traffic problem that is the cause of many city-wide issues and frustrations. One of which is a sprawling, difficult to manage infrastructure that can be daunting if not dangerous to navigate. While the City of Austin has put forth an effort to work with and for cyclists, they haven't succeeded in continuity of thought, design, or implementation. Austin also sits on the Balcones escarpment, creating a divide of undulating and sometimes short unnecessary hill climbs. There are other "hurdles" oft-cited by those who would like to commute by bike such as weather, and a distance.
###Research I have my own observations and anecdotal evidence through recreational riding, and commuting on several occasions. To get a bigger picture, I looked began to research the issue of why Austin is mentioned as a bike friendly city yet the number of bicycle commuters is a measly 1.5% of it's working population.
Through studying data cited by the City of Austin, Austin Police Department, BikeAustin.org, American League of Bicyclists, and general data from Copenhagenize, I learned that infrastructure and driver education are huge factors. Austin does an arguably poor job at both of these, and this is a good indicator that would reinforce some of my own findings
I decided to create a survey and get people's thoughts on bicycle commuting and why it is or isn't something they consider as an option. The most often mentioned deterrent was safety with riding in traffic. What did people say would help most often? A good route. They want a safe, and enjoyable ride to work or wherever they're going without having to scout it and ride all over the place first.
###The proposal for a mobile solution Cycling is big business, and while the hardware for commuter bicycles is well engineered, software hasn't given it much of a glance. Cycling's recreational world gets all the love. Apps like Strava and Map My Ride provide excellent tracking and data for those of us who want to push ourselves to new distances on the weekends.
That's why I came up with Zephyr — a native mobile application concept that will use current mapping technologies and combine it with crowd sourced data to give safer, more enjoyable routing for bicycle commuters. Core functionality will provide proper routing and turn by turn navigation that avoids poorly designed bike lanes, dangerous intersections, unnecessary hill climbs, and other potential issues while still considering travel time and distance ridden.
Zephyr's goal is to reduce or remove as many potential deterrents to bicycle commuting as possible. The business model would be designed in such a way to give back to the local cycling community and assist the city with infrastructure planning decisions for future bicycle projects.