National Database Road Traffic Data (NDW) working on making bicycle data accessible
Already for a while the National Database Road Traffic Data (NDW) has been working on making bicycle data accessible. Next year, the first data should become widely available.
NDW is doing this in the context of the Talking Bikes project, a project of the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management. The idea behind this is that the NDW purchases bicycle data from parties that provide services to cyclists, such as navigation and sports apps such as Strava. This autumn they want to buy the data, after which the data will become available in 2020. The NDW wants to prevent that all municipalities have to go to Strava and build up the expertise themselves. 'We want a municipality to file a data request with the NDW, which then looks at what is needed; what data is already available from mobile sources and what may be needed in addition. It shouldn’t matter where the data comes from. Whether it's data from the Bicycle Counting Week, an app or counting detector' said the NDW last year in the journal Fietsverkeer.
A precondition for data delivery within Talking Bikes is that these parties incorporate the new services available around intelligent traffic control installations into their applications. This makes information about time-to-green and time-to-red available in bicycle apps, and upcoming (groups of) cyclists can be automatically identified at intersections for smoother flow.
Furthermore, together with a number of experts from the bicycle field, the NDW has developed a new standard for the exchange of bicycle count data. More uniformity in data makes it easier to exchange data, compare and create standard reports. The standard is ready and is now used in the first assignment that runs via the NDW framework agreement, but also in a number of assignments that partners have put on the market themselves.
The NDW has also started to expand Dexter, the historical traffic data platform, to be able to request bicycle data. The first results of this are expected in the fourth quarter.