You’re invited: Please come test our new cycle collision tracker

Whether you’ve had a collision or near miss on your bike or just know the roads inside out, we’d love it if you’d come join us at the Teachers Club on 22 February to try putting the details into our new Active Travel Collision Tracker.

We’re just getting ready to launch it, and hope to chat with you at the event that Thursday evening from 7.30pm about how you find using it, and whether you think it needs improvements before the launch.

The idea behind the Active Travel Collision Tracker is that the data available pretty much only on a small sliver of cycle collisions – the tip of the iceberg. Below the surface are many, many more that aren’t reported and recorded.

If we can gather details on as many of those until-now-unreported collisions, and map them with this tool, that will reveal clusters, pointing to themes and particular hazards on specific roads.

At Dublin Inquirer, we plan to use this as a tool for our reporting, writing articles about specific clusters in the city, for example. To get to the bottom of what is causing those collisions in those places and what could be done to solve that problem.

We’re teaming up with cycling news website IrishCycle.com as well, which has a national audience, so they can write articles based on the data gathered via the Collision Tracker too. And we’re open to adding more news outlets to this network too.

We think this will work pretty well because we’ve done it before. We ran a similar tool from 2015 to about 2018, and wrote a series of articles on dangerous spots it highlighted.

For technical reasons, though, that stopped working – and so we’re now getting ready to launch an all-new version, taking into account what we learned the first time around.

In addition to using the information gathered through the Collision Tracker as a reporting tool for journalists, we hope in future to also make it available to academic researchers – and even councillors or people working on councils’ active travel teams.

Hopefully, all this will – over time – play at least a small role in helping to make cycling in Ireland a little bit safer.

That’s a good thing in itself, but could also have the knock-on effect of encouraging more people to cycle when and if they can, reducing air pollution, noise and carbon emissions.

One step at a time though. If you have the time to come join us at the Teachers Club on Parnell Square on Thursday 22 February from 7.30pm, we’d love to get your input.

Brian Rogers, who built the Active Travel Collision Tracker, will be there to give a brief presentation on it. Please bring a phone or other device you can use to then try it out by using it to report an incident you’ve experienced or witnessed.

You’ll then have a chance to give feedback to Brian and us at Dublin Inquirer about your experience using the tool. And there’s a bar in the building, in case you get thirsty from all the listening and talking.

Please email sam@dublininquirer.com to RSVP so we can get a sense of numbers before the evening.