If you’ve ever driven a car through a crowded urban sprawl, then chances are you’ve become personally acquainted with bicyclists and motorcyclists seemingly materializing out of nowhere and weaving through traffic. By contrast, if you’re one of these riders yourself, than you’ve undoubtedly had close calls with careless drivers switching lanes without securing their blind spots. Not seeing the cyclists until it’s too late is one of the most common elements in collisions between these parties. To resolve this issue once and for all, a new app called BikeShieldApp, creates a vehicle-to-vehicle communication network between smartphones found in cars, bikes, and motorcycles on the road to warn drivers whenever a bike’s nearby.
“You've probably had the experience that you're driving your car, and all of the sudden a motorcycle passes you on the left, fast,” says Pere Margalef, one of the lead designers of BikeShieldApp. “You think if you'd just decided to change lanes, you would have hit this guy. So I thought, what if somehow before I even see him, I know that he's coming?”
Unlike some of the other accident prevention solutions being developed, BikeShieldApp is the first known concept to rely exclusively on ubiquitous gadgets (smartphones) rather than new external hardware such as sensors. Such an approach can fill in the gap between the present and the day when autonomous vehicles with built-in sensors become the norm.
Essentially, the app leverages the GPS capability found in contemporary smartphones to track nearby vehicles. If the proximity between surrounding vehicles decreases to the point of creating a risky, accident-prone situation, the app will notify the driver.
Users select their vehicle type and which of the three notification types they prefer: acoustic, visual, or voice. If the voice notification is selected, a warning will announce the side the bike approaches on, approximately five to ten seconds before it’s seen.
For safety’s sake, this feature is disabled when selecting the bicycle as your vehicle bicycle/motorcycle as your vehicle;nonetheless, drivers using the app are still informed of your presence. Alternatively, bicyclists are given recommendations on the safest route to take based on crowd-sourced data from other app users. To encourage wide adoption, the app is available for free. Margalef hopes to someday integrate the app’s function into commonly used navigation apps like Google Maps and Waze.
“When I bought my motorcycle, all my friends were freaking out, saying, 'You're going to kill yourself, don't do this,'” explains Margalef. “So now I can say I found a solution to keep me safe. If everyone who rides a bike or motorcycle shares it with 10 people, that's one way for car drivers to start using it.”
The app will be available for Android and Apple phones on September 12, 2014.
Source: Thebikeshieldapp/Fastcoexist.com
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