When it comes to vehicle obstructions and other hindrances to Pittsburgh's dedicated bicycle lanes, some areas appear to have more offenders than others per the findings of a local startup called Dashcam for your Bike.
The startup, run by Founder and CEO Armin Samii, released its first report this week that offers a street-by-street look — and at intervals down to the hour — at the parts of the city where users of the startup's platform are running into challenges the most. Samii founded the company, a participant in the PGH Lab 7.0 cohort, in 2022, and it is currently pre-revenue.
With the Dashcam for your Bike app, users mount their smartphone to their bicycle so the app can record and monitor an entire trip, which also incorporates video capture via the phone's cameras as well as GPS monitoring. This then allows users to quickly flag any issue they encounter along their journey — like potholes, vehicles parked in bike lanes or dangerous driving from other motorists, among others — for easier reporting to 311, Pittsburgh's response center for non-emergencies.
Samii said the startup has been collecting the data from its users over the past few weeks to better identify portions of the city where offenses are occurring the most. The area encompassing Penn Avenue near 10th Street downtown has the most offenses so far, Samii said, though other pile-ups of reports can be seen on 40th Street in Lawrenceville as well as North and South Negley Avenue between the neighborhoods of East Liberty and Friendship. The startup released an interactive map showing all of its reports thus far on its website.
"All the data on that map has been set to 311 so the city has had access to all this data as it comes in. They have the data; once you report it, the city gets access," Samii said. "What this map does is it also gives the public access to see the scope of the problem, and I think a lot of people just don't realize how big of a problem this is."
Samii said that while a motorist might not see much of an issue with briefly parking in a bike lane, that then forces anyone on a bicycle during that time to merge into traffic to get around the obstacle a vehicle causes. On Penn Avenue downtown and in other portions of the city, that means riding a bicycle into oncoming traffic.
He hopes the map and the data behind it will lead the city to create better biking infrastructure and enforcement, the latter of which he views as a "last resort."
"The current state is not a solution that works for everybody," Samii said. "It really puts bicyclists' lives at risk. So we're not at war [with motorists]. We're trying to find a collaborative way to make the city better."
