The purpose of our final project was to provide the City of Vancouver with a survey of the current state of bike lane infrastructure and to suggest improvements in order to improve bike lane infrastructure as the city moves towards its goal of Greenest City 2020. After acquiring data from a wide array of sources, we used ESRI’s ArcGIS program to create a series of visual representations of current infrastructure, income, bike usage, population, bike accidents and schools. After extracting key data, we performed visual analysis to determine that while current infrastructure serves those who already bike, improvements could be made to encourage more biking. We created six maps and included these in the appendices. As well, we chose to work together as a group to tackle this project, everyone contributed to the making of the maps as well as to the writeup.
This was an interesting project to work on together and I enjoyed working on a project that I could actually see being implemented in my city. I often travel along the bike lanes that we researched and so I was able to contribute practical knowledge to the creation of our maps and sources. Working on this project required a lot of communication and sharing of data and information. We found it best to each work individually while checking in with each other often, as this allowed us to use our own creativity in the project, which we could then share with others. We were lucky in that our data was easy to source and easy to access for everyone, I imagine that if you were using a more complicated dataset, it may be difficult to transfer the data among partners. Our data came mainly from the City of Vancouver database, which was a great help for us. We appreciated that the city is so open to citizen science and is willing to support it however possible. Finally, although I recognize that some of our suggestions are likely not feasible, such as dedicating one lane of Kingsway to bicycles, we have created a great database of information and data that can be drawn from in order to make decisions regarding the placement of further bike lanes.