Cycling is climate-friendly and cost-effective and therefore plays a role in shaping a turnaround in transport policy. However, in many places the necessary infrastructure is not yet suitable for getting cyclists from A to B safely and comfortably. In order to be able to plan cycle paths more efficiently and in a more demand-oriented manner and to evaluate construction projects, analysis data of the entire road network is necessary.

Transport and traffic scientists at TU Dresden (TUD) are therefore developing within the Move:On project a platform for digital cycling data from smartphone applications together with the TUD spin-off Flow.d GmbH and Klima-Bündnis e. V. (Climate Alliance).

For this purpose, data will be collected by means of a smartphone application as part of the nationwide STADTRADELN campaign (City Cycling) in the years 2022-2024. The project aims to expand the information and data offered by the existing cycling data platform “RiDE - Radverkehr in Deutschland” (Cycling in Germany) and to enable more than 2,000 municipalities to access it.

Move:On is based on the predecessor project MOVEBIS, which ran from July 2017 to the end of 2020. The data platform RiDE—developed in this project—was made available to more than 1,400 municipalities nationwide for a short time after the project ended. In the follow-up project Move:On, the information offered by the data platform is being further developed.

Further use cases are being developed from existing ideas and concepts, which should answer new research questions. For example, it is being investigated to what extent the increase in the number of participants in the STADTRADELN campaign is proof of successful cycling promotion in a municipality. Another research focus is the development of approaches to strengthen cycling and data collection in suburban and rural areas.

As in the previous project, the data from the STADTRADELN campaign is used for this purpose. This data is collected with a smartphone application as part of the annual cycling campaign. The data is then automatically processed and cleaned, e. g. by identifying journeys made with other modes of transport or activities at the workplace such as walking or rolling back and forth with the desk chair, and then removing them from the data set. The cycling data checked in this way is then visualized in an online platform for all municipalities participating in the STADTRADELN campaign. This creates valuable planning data for municipalities that want to further develop cycling.

In the first project phase of Move:On in 2022, the existing use cases, waiting times at intersections and the representation of source-destination relationships of cyclists will be evaluated and revised.

For this purpose, transport and traffic planners in pilot municipalities such as Tuttlingen, Offenburg and Münster will be included in the research work. User feedback will be generated and empirical surveys will be conducted and evaluated.

In the second and third project phase (2023/2024), the new use cases “Average daily cycle traffic” and “Panel evaluation for the evaluation of cycling measures” will be designed and implemented as prototypes. Parts of the research results will be delivered via the data portal.

In the project consortium, the Chair of Transport Ecology at the “Friedrich List” Faculty of Transport and Traffic Sciences at TU Dresden provides concepts and algorithms that are subsequently tested. If successful, they will find their way into the visualization platform as new use cases. Klima-Bündnis e. V. (Climate Alliance) contributes expertise from twelve years of development work in the STADTRADELN campaign as well as several years of experience in supporting app development for the iOS and Android operating systems to the MoveOn project. flow.d GmbH is a spin-off of the Chair of Computer Networks at the TU Dresden, which was involved in the MOVEBIS project. It bundles experience in the field of software architecture and development and supports the software platform RiDE used in the project.

The MoveOn project is funded by the Federal Ministry for Digital and Transport (BMDV) with €2.31 million as part of the National Cycling Plan 3.0.