BeCity: sensing and sensibility on urban cycling for smarter cities

The vision of smart cities is in the usage of ICT and web technologies to connect and monitor different elements of the urban space such as buildings, power and transport networks. Thus, the aim is to identify new solutions with the purpose of improving sustainability and livability. Mobile and participatory sensing systems play a big role. Using smartphones as a tool for social impact, it is possible to take advantage of their sensing and communication capabilities to monitor the environment. Even though this kind of system seems to be "centralized", the data acquisition by mobile devices, the analysis in data centers and the user centered results produce a system that is, in essence, a distributed system. In this article we present our participatory sensing system: BeCity. BeCity takes advantage of the collective knowledge of transportation cyclists to improve the quality of city cycling. It provides refined (and up-to-date) city usage information for cycling associations and government entities. Moreover, the distilled information is returned to the users, by recommending bike-friendly route planning. Our contribution is twofold. First, the distributed system by itself. Second, the algorithm to suggest bike routes which considers both the shortest and the most popular route. In many cases, the recommendation algorithm performs better suggestions than the one used by Google Maps.