Cycling Guide at the Ontario Bike Summit

Published by Mark Connolly on March 25, 2024March 25, 2024

Spring is tentatively arriving in Southwestern Ontario, though not without periodic swings back to wintry weather. As biking without snow and ice looks more feasible, here at Cycling Guide Foundation we’re also turning our own attention to the Ontario Bike Summit that’s happening in the City of Waterloo on April 3–5. It’s pretty exciting that this event is happening in the city where our Cycling Guide mobile app was initially conceived and created and where we continue with design and development work.

I’ll be doing a presentation about the app on April 4 as a part of a set of presentations focused on “Encouragement Strategies”. Here’s the event description for my presentation:

Low-stress, cycling-friendly routes to get more people onto bikes

In a US survey in 2016, “Revisiting the Four Types of Cyclists: Findings from a National Survey“, Jennifer Dill and Nathan McNeil found that 60% of adults wanted to cycle more, though were “Interested but Concerned”. That’s a large part of the population who would like to cycle more than they do now if they felt more confident.

And those are the people who we believe will get the most out of Cycling Guide, using its low-stress, cycling-friendly routes to get around. Cycling Guide is a free mobile app for iPhone and Android.

This case study will show how we created the app in Waterloo Region, and how it delivers low-stress routes based on the Level of Traffic Stress (LTS) framework that was first presented in a 2012 paper by Maaza C. Mekuria, Peter G. Furth, and Hilary Nixon called “Network Connectivity for Low-Stress Bicycling“.

If you’re at the summit, please say hello!