There are more and more cyclists in Brussels. In order to contribute to making cycling part of a positive experience in our Brussels smart city, the new Ping if you care app allows cyclists to contribute to road safety and enhance their daily lives.
The
Flemish specialist mobility association Mobiel21 has thought about the issue of cyclist safety in Brussels and has launched the mobile app
Ping if you care. Its principle is to allow cyclists to identify on the ground those roads or parts of roads which are less safe for cycling in the Brussels region. Their reports will be used to make a map of less safe areas for cyclists in the Brussels region and, thus, to better define the road safety policy.
Ping if you care in practice
Ping if you care takes the form of a button that cyclists place on their bike handlebars and connect to their smartphone. When the road is not safe, the cyclist simply presses on the button so that the application remembers their GPS position. Each place reported by users of
Ping if you care can thus be identified on an overall map. Subsequently, “pingers” can also add a short comment to give more information about the problem that they have encountered.
500 cyclists invited to test out the app
A full-scale test of
Ping if you care will be carried out from May to July 2017. 500 testers of
Ping if you care will be selected after a call for applicants launched by Mobiel21 in consultation with Brussels Mobility and associations of cyclists so as to represent, as accurately as possible, the whole of the population of Brussels. The
Ping if you care smart project has come about thanks to a subsidy of EUR 123,500 from the
Secretary of State of Brussels in charge of road safety, Bianca Debaets.
