Explore how comfortable it is to bike in greater Boston
BCU Labs is working to build data-backed tools to help people identify the strengths and weaknesses of the biking network in greater Boston.
With this stress map, we aim to:
- Help provide the vocabulary to communicate your experience biking in Boston
- Show people alternative routes that may be lower-stress
- Highlight gaps in the network that could be candidates for improvements
The Bike Stress Map is our first project, rating every street in Boston, Cambridge, Somerville, and Brookline based on how comfortable it is to ride a bike on. It is a work in progress and a community effort—read below for ways to contribute or update the map.
Getting started with this map
If you aren’t exactly sure what is going on with this map or how to use it, don’t worry, this is a new concept to a lot of people.
How to use this map
- Zoom in and out by scrolling
- Click on a street to see its rating, and details on infrastructure that exists there
- In the bottom left of the map, click the icons to understand more about each stress rating
There are many ways you can use this map. To start, we recommend exploring your neighborhood and places you are familiar with, like your commute.
Once you are comfortable with the tool, explore less stressful routes to your favorite destinations, plan trips to new ones, or identify a need to advocate for specific streets to be improved that would make your journeys better.
What is this map?
This map attempts to rate every street segment in Boston, Cambridge, Somerville, and Brookline based on how comfortable it is to bike on. This is based on a concept called Level of Traffic Stress, which evaluates streets based on some of the most important features that affect the biking experience. This includes things like bike lanes and if they have separation, but also how many cars are traveling on the street and how fast those cars are going. As many cyclists intuitively understand, it may be more comfortable to bike on a quiet residential street than a high-speed arterial street (e.g. Mass Ave.) with a painted bike lane. This system attempts to quantify that intuition into a clear rating system to be able to see the overall effective comfortable biking network, rather than just mapping where bike lanes exist.
Read more about our methodology here.
Why is BCU Labs making this map?
While it is true that the City of Boston has created a Level of Traffic Stress map, this is not a particularly useful tool for the cycling community. For example, if you wanted to bike from Allston to Jamaica Plain, two neighborhoods of Boston, you would likely want to bike through Brookline, an independent city which isn’t included on the City of Boston’s map.
Within greater Boston, it is completely normal to bike through two or even three or four cities on a given day. BCU Labs is uniquely able to view cycling comfort at the regional level to create a tool cyclists in Boston can use for their daily trips instead of being primarily valuable for city planners.
Additionally, by utilizing OpenStreetMap (OSM) as the primary data source, we are able to continuously update street ratings as the streets change or the data accuracy improves.
Finally, by building an easy-to-use map, we hope to achieve a few things:
- The general public finds this a valuable tool in bettering their daily route selection.
- Advocates can better communicate where and why street improvements will improve the safe bike network.
- Researchers are able to use our data and calculations to jumpstart more interesting analyses that may lead to better insights in the value of the bike network or how to improve the network in the most impactful way.
BCU Labs is working towards these goals too. If you want to help in any way, please:
What if you disagree with a street segment rating?
If a street you ride on regularly feels more or less comfortable than how we have rated it, you are probably right! We use OpenStreetMap (OSM) for our data and as a data source it is incomplete. This forces us to make some assumptions, and we are probably wrong in some places.
You can learn to fix the data yourself, or fill out this form with what you know and the BCU Labs team will bike there ourselves to survey, then fix the data.