Snifferbike in the Province of Utrecht
Utrecht Region has been in the top 2 of the EU Regional Competitiveness Index[1] for several editions. The province of Utrecht has the ambition to stay one of the most competitive regions in Europe and wants to do so by contributing to the development of healthy region with optimal living and working climate. The snifferbike experiment is an attempt to contribute to the knowledge needs of the province of Utrecht on matters like air quality, cycling behavior, data distribution and interaction with society.
The experiment started in mid-2019 and was supposed to run until the (cancelled) start of Vuelta a España in Utrecht in August 2020. Five hundred volunteers in the province of Utrecht and fifty volunteers in the neighboring Food Valley region attached the device on their bicycles and started collecting data. In a personal environment the participants of the provincial experiment can see their personal results.
Snifferbike devices have also been deployed in the city of Zwolle. From Zwolle and several other places in Europe, data has been uploaded to a central data platform. The combined data is available from this open data platform that is funded by the province of Utrecht.
Several academic institutions have used the data from the data platform. BITS partner University of Oldenburg analyses the data to find cycling behavior - as well as other universities. The data is also being used in the province of Utrecht for the analysis of route choice and delays at traffic lights. These analysis methods are being developed by Breda University of applied sciences.
In it’s current form, the snifferbike experiment in the province of Utrecht is nearing the end of its (extended) data collection phase. The experiment will be evaluated and and a decision will be made on the continuation of the experiment.
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/regional_policy/en/information/maps/regional_competitiveness