Lit-Lane: The Smart Bike Lane

Earlier this year, the City of Philadelphia released its Vision Zero Action Plan. This ambitious plan aims to reduce traffic deaths in Philadelphia to zero by 2030, and is the major motivation behind our design.

The plan outlines four major goals:

We believe that the Lit-Lane design and concept can be a powerful tool in achieving all four goals.

The Problem: bike network is incomplete and misused

 

Even in bike lanes, bikers are often an afterthought. Cars, trucks, and buses regularly drive, stop and turn (and open their doors) into bike lanes, which deters people from biking and jeopardizes the safety of cyclists.

This issue is especially prevalent in Philadelphia, which has one of the highest rates of biking deaths per capita in the U.S, with higher rates than Boston, NYC, and LA. It is also important to note that biking accidents are very localized to specific streets- just 12% of Philadelphia Streets account for 50% of serious injuries or fatalities.

It’s time to take action:

If planners really want to promote biking and reduce deaths, we need to get serious about improving safety and making roads work for bikers.

The Solution: Enter Lit-Lane!

The aim of our design is to:

• Make bikers more visible and noticeable
• Reduce obstacles in bike lanes
• Make biking more beautiful and fun
• Create a psychological shift to reclaim the bike lane
• Be adaptive to different street typologies and preferences

Lit-Lane uses a combination of sensors (more on this later) to sense and react to the conditions on the bike lane. When Lit-Lane senses bikers, it surrounds them with beautiful white lights that lead in front of them and make them more visible to cars ahead. When Lit-Lane senses cars, it reacts with blinking lights which change from yellow to red, to notify the drivers that they must vacate the lane.

Lit-Lane is better than the traditional alternatives

• Painted buffers: low protection, low night protection
• Delineator posts: unattractive, obstructive, not durable
• Bumps/Ballards: unattractive,  can cause damage, prohibitive
• Parked cars: space inefficient, potential to get doored
• Cast curbs or planters: space inefficient, very expensive

Instead, Lit-Lane:

• Achieves safety goals
• Creates no physical barriers
• Is more space efficient
• Actively discourages bad behavior
• Is beautiful, and creates an attraction that promotes biking and active transport

Lit-Lane I/O

Sensory Inputs-

• Weight sensors: Classify vehicle as bicycle or car
• Ultrasonic distance sensors: Detect the location of vehicles

Reaction-

• LED Strips: White light surrounds moving cyclists. Yellow light signals a warning when cars crosses lane. Red light signals when car hasn’t moved.
• Sound Buzzer: Warns cars to move out of bike lane

The diagram below shows how the sensory inputs are processed and used to illicit a response.

 

So, How Does It Work?

To demonstrate our concept, we created a prototype using an Arduino board and some off-the-shelf sensors. The prototype really brings the idea to life! We put together a short video to show the end results (disclaimer: video was not sponsored by diet coke…).

Note that the sensor bump in the middle of the lane is not to scale. In reality, the sensor will remain very small while the lane would be… well… life sized.

Here are the nuts and bolts of how we put together the prototype:

Making It A Reality

We wanted to imagine what Lit-Lane would look like in the real world.  To do this, we picked a location we think would be ideal for this type of project: Broad Street.

We picked a section of Broad Street that is specifically identified in the Vision Zero Plan as being high risk for bikers.

This is a map of bike accident hot spots in Philadelphia:

In addition to being a high risk street section, we believe this part of Broad Street will be ideal because of the high-profile nature of the street design. The lights and sounds produced by Lit-Lane will likely be best received in streets that are already bright and loud. However, like we mentioned earlier in the post, it will be very easy to adapt the settings of Lit-Lane to fit different street typologies. Streets that are residential/quiet can have little to no noise response and lights that are programmed to be less disruptive to residents. Additionally, we believe main commercial streets are ideal because the spectacle and attraction that Lit-Lane creates has the potential of increasing tourism and economic activity. This will help garner the support of the business community downtown.

Before + After mockups help imagine what could be:

 

Dealing With Costs

Determining cost is currently tricky with Lit-Lane. While less so than some alternatives, our prototype is still somewhat expensive, due to the nature of the weight sensors needing to be in the ground. However, newer iterations of the project can be adapted to reduce this cost.

This being the first iteration of the design, we believe that large potential exists for reducing costs in future designs. Reworking the sensor configuration such that installation/maintenance will not require digging up the street will drive the costs down dramatically. Many technologies ranging from low-end (such as on-bike sensors) to high-end (such as machine vision) could be used to achieve this goal in the future.

 

Thank you!

Thank you so much for reading, and happy biking!

 

Guy Duer, Rachael Hartofelis, and Boao Xia

CPLN571, Prof. Allison Lassiter, University of Pennsylvania

December 2017

 

Appendix: Prototype Code