Newham Council deploys cycle light sensors for data insights

The London Borough of Newham has begun to deploy bicycle lights with sensors to gather data on cycling and pedestrian routes.

It is partnering with cycling tech company See.Sense on a 12-month ‘smart cycling’ project, which will initially support the Romford Road Active Travel scheme and, longer term, the council's 15 Minute Neighbourhood programme.

Newham has distributed the lights to around 200 residents. They can be synched with a smartphone app that sends anonymised data to the council to support its planning on infrastructure improvements.

The sensors monitor the cyclist's environment at up to 800 times per second, providing data on swerving, braking, speeds, dwell times, road roughness and movement patterns. They can also feed into cyclist survey reports.

The data is sent to a See.Sense system to provide insights on popular cycling routes, near miss incidents, crash events, rapid speed changes, swerving, road surface conditions and average speeds.

It will be aggregated onto dashboards for Newham's highways team to monitor work on improving the Romford Road Corridor and identify when they need to improve roads and connections for cyclists; and used in engagement with cyclists.

Riders also have the option to report specific issues via the app, aimed at fostering a safer cycling environment.

Newham's senior project manager, Martina Gabrielli, said: "The smart cycling project offers a unique opportunity for Newham's citizens and the council to work together to better understand cycling behaviour and safety in the Romford Road area.

"This type of data would be difficult to capture by other means and will really help boost our monitoring and evaluation of the scheme, as well as inform the design and maintenance of Newham cycling infrastructure, improve safety and ultimately enable more people to cycle with data led evaluation."

See.Sense said the lights also support safety by increasing their flash intensity in potentially dangerous situations, such as those requiring sudden braking.