Comfort Maps
  • What are Comfort Maps?

    Comfort Maps make safer streets. Turn your two-wheeled commute into a call for action.

    These are stories told about the lived experience of bicyclists on city streets.

    Learn more...
  • Get the camera

    Two ways to add your own ratings and snapshots to Comfort Maps: use the iPhone app or buy a special camera.

    Download the app...

    The Comfort Maps camera is a physical hardware device that mounts on the handlebars of a bicycle or e-scooter and creates a safe and easy method for rating the comfort levels of streets.

    Buy the camera...

Where does biking in Cambridge fall short?

Cambridge, Massachusetts is home to 120,000 people. In the Cambridge Bicycle Plan, published in 2015, Cambridge has committed to increasing the share of commute trips by bike to 10% by 2020. The U.S. national average in 2014 was 0.6%.

The city has also set a goal of decreasing bike crashes by 50 percent. The path to achieving this safety goal is by improving roads to support cyclists. Here's what the bicycle network looks like on the streets today and where improvements are needed.

Samuel Clay
May 13th, 2020

Bike Lanes of Today

As of 2018 there are 92 miles of bike lanes across the city of Cambridge. The proposed Cambridge Bicycle Plan 2020 calls for adding 75 more miles between 2013 and 2019. And reaching 350+ total miles by 2043.

Cambridge is creating a world-class biking city, and to accomplish that the city needs to do more than add bike lanes. Improving safety is what leads to increasing usage of the bike facilities in the city and to do that Cambridge needs to consider several problem areas.

Cambridge has many great streets for biking

Cycleways and separated bike lanes are prominent in the city, but there's no connection between major transit hubs that a person can take on a bicycle without going through dangerous street designs.

"Networks of protected bike lanes" is the mantra of safer biking. Even with the Cycling Safety Ordinance, which ensures the gradual building of separated bike lanes, the rate at which crashes are lowering means we will see ten more years of unnecessary deaths caused by lack of safe biking infrastructure.

Oxford Street is a bottleneck

But there remains a handful of parking spots even though there are numerous bikes and lightweight two-wheeled vehicles rolling through. This map shows where the street is hazardous for bikes due to unnecessary parking.

Most crashes in Cambridge are caused by drivers not seeing cyclists, whether or not the bicycle was in a bike lane.

Take a ride down JFK St

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Explore the many snapshots of Cambridge

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What are Comfort Maps?

A revolution in mobility began three years ago. And in no city is bike infrastructure up to the task. Millions of people are using e-scooters, e-bikes, and e-mopeds to commute, but the streets we use are unsafe and undesirable. The problem is that while cities might choose to build bike lanes, most built bike lanes are inadequate to support the growth of greener modes of transport.

Comfort Maps is a tool for advocates to use real-time street safety data in discussions with policymakers. Combining a physical hardware device that mounts on the handlebars of a bicycle or e-scooter with a data visualization platform, Comfort Maps creates a safe and easy method for rating the comfort levels of streets. These ratings and snapshots provide a photographic lived experience that could not easily be captured and shared before.

The Comfort Maps data visualization platform provides insights into problem hotspots with real evidence. It also provides open data for circuity metrics and transit services to use for improved routing directions. Lastly, the platform aggregates patterns into visible trends, offering support to advocates in the form of sharable visualizations that illustrate the lived experience of the bike lane.

Comfort Maps is built by Samuel Clay. You can contact him @samuelclay.