From scenic trails and coastal paths to getting to and from work, many Santa Barbara County residents rely on their bicycles for sustainable, fun and efficient transportation.
However, safety concerns and navigation issues have made some residents hesitant to make the switch from a vehicle to a bike.
A new project of UC Santa Barbara, the Santa Barbara County Association of Governments and Simon Fraser University looks to change that by training artificial intelligence to map bike paths and infrastructure in order to create a digital and physical countywide bike map.
SBCAG received $480,000 for the project from the California Department of Transportation as part of a $73 million award to 146 applicants. The funding will go toward design, a wayfinding plan and developing the AI model.
Trisalyn Nelson, a geography professor at UCSB and founder of bikemaps.org, will be part of developing the AI model used to map the bike paths.
“Unlike a car navigator where you press Google Maps and you listen as you go, if you’re navigating on a bike, you need to know exactly where you’re going and the best route to get there before you leave the house,” Nelson said. “This map will be a tool that will allow people to more easily identify a safe route from where they started and where they’re heading.”
The project has four key objectives. The first is to train the AI with data from Google Street View and OpenStreetMap. An advisory committee from UCSB and Simon Fraser University will be involved in informing, developing and training the AI model.
Students will provide training data by labeling aspects of the road that make them easy or difficult for cyclists. Based on that training, the AI model will then give every road in Santa Barbara County its own classification.
That means that every street and pathway in the county will receive its own ranking based on how comfortable the road is for cyclists. Once the map is ready, cyclists will be able to choose a route with which they feel comfortable.
“The research is definitive that the No. 1 obstacle is concern for safety; people don’t want to get hit,” Nelson said. “That is why a map that shows you where it’s comfortable to ride is so important to overcoming that concern.”
Comfort is based on how busy vehicle traffic is on a particular street as well as the level of protection for a particular bike lane.
“There’s this idea that our streets should be safe for people aged 8 to 80,” Nelson said. “The very comfortable streets are the ones that you would take your 80-year-old parents or your 8-year-old children on, and then there’s going to be some that I would be willing to ride on because I’m a comfortable rider. I think this is sort of built to let people make decisions that are really good for them and their families.”
Once the data is collected, a cartography specialist will use it to create a digital and hard copy bike map.
The last time SBCAG made a physical bike map was in 2013. Lauren Bianchi Klemann, SBCAG’s public information manager, said a physical bike map is one of its most requested resources from the public.
The final objective is to develop a wayfinding plan. Wayfinding is a series of physical signs and other designs to help cyclists navigate without using navigation.
“I think it’s an important piece of equity,” said Peter Williamson, a planner on SBCAG’s multimodal programs team. “We’re creating this cool electronic product, but at the end of the day, if that’s only accessible on your phone, it’s going to miss a chunk of the population.”
The team will develop a plan for the wayfinding system, but they need additional funding to implement the plan.
“You have to have a plan to get more money. Signs and infrastructure cost quite a bit more money, so a piece of this project is to get a plan that can be deployed in a future cycle,” Williamson said. “There is not a county-wide wayfinding plan, but this is the first step.”
The project is expected to take two to three years. Nelson said the AI model should be up and running within 18 months to begin classifying roads, and after that, they will begin working with a cartographer to design the map.
Aaron Bonfilio, director of multimodal programs, said SBCAG will be working to get public input on the project throughout the next two to three years.
Nelson said another way the public can get involved is by using bikemaps.org, which is a UCSB-operated crowdsourcing tool that allows cyclists to add their own data about crashes, unsafe roads, hazards and thefts.
“We’re going to pull all that data as we build our comfort rankings, because it has good information in there about what’s actually happening for people and where people are getting hurt,” Nelson said.
Bonfilio said AI and infrastructure will continue to overlap in the future and that many public works agencies are already using AI to identify road conditions.
“To the degree that AI is trained on something that is kept up to date and that there’s good data going in, we’ll be able to use that to provide a very meaningful tool going out,” Bonfilio said.
Tristen Miller, a member of Strong Towns Santa Barbara and a resident who uses his bike for transportation to save money, said he’s looking forward to having an updated county map with clear safety indicators.
“The city has a map, but it uses the federal bike level rules, and that’s really confusing, even for me, who has done a lot of research about it,” Miller said. “What they’re trying to do here, I think, makes a lot of sense to try to make it more understandable for everyone.”
Miller said having a map that shows which streets have added bike infrastructure and protection would be helpful when planning his route.
“I wouldn’t bike on some of the busier streets in Santa Barbara, but I would bike on something that has minimal bike improvements, but it’s not really clear which street has what right now,” Miller said.
He said he uses Google Maps and Santa Barbara’s city map to plan his routes, but that those tools aren’t always an accurate indicator of the road conditions. For example, he said Anapamu Street is marked as a bike route, but only a few blocks have bike lanes.
Another resource that Miller said he would like to see is a map that shows where people can park their bikes and where BCycle stations are located.
He said the reason so many people don’t bike is because they don’t feel safe, but he thinks having a map that shows protected infrastructure will help get more people on their bikes.
“That’s why we’ve seen so many bikes on State Street, because it’s so much safer because there’s no conflict with cars,” Miller said. “You see all kinds of people who might not ordinarily bike suddenly biking on State Street, and this tool will really help identify what routes are actually safe, if they do it right.”
Nelson said she hopes the map will help get more people on bikes by showing them where there would be comfortable places to ride.
“The No. 1 thing I hope is someone who doesn’t feel that riding a bike is possible for them right now looks at the map and realizes, ‘Oh, there’s an area near my house or an area that I’d like to visit which would be perfect for biking for me,’” Nelson said. “Really, that transition from wanting to bike to actually getting on a bike is the No. 1 thing I’m really hoping this project will serve.”
