The REMAP-led Civic Bicycle Commuting project (CiBiC) is launching a community-driven mobile app, along with a participatory media cartography, designed to enable and support bike-to-work communities of practice via co-creative cyberphysical systems. Ecosystems of cloud-supported, smartphone-based technologies are being developed to increase the number of people willing to bike to work, foster community recruitment and retention, and inform future plans for physical bicycling infrastructure.
As one of only seventeen recipients of Stage 2 funding from the National Science Foundation’s Civic Innovation Challenge, CiBiC targets the spatial mismatch gap by building a secure, mobile group bicycling system, a model for supporting increased transportation satisfaction, lower transportation costs, and improved flexibility to respond to employment and housing opportunities. The focus area is the northeast section of Downtown Los Angeles; in partnership with the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition and the Los Angeles River State Park Partners, the work must strategize around the limitations of the Los Angeles transit infrastructure, one of the most stressed in the nation.
The project has been ongoing since being selected as one of only 52 civic-academic partnerships to receive Stage 1 Civic Innovation Challenge funding, to refine concepts for ready-to-implement, research-based civic pilot projects addressing “Communities and Mobility” or “Resilience to Natural Disaster,” which would then, if selected to receive Stage 2 funding, be implemented during the subsequent twelve-month period. During CiBiC’s pilot stage (January 2021-September 30, 2021), participatory mobile technologies were used to assemble and guide groups of bicyclists and encourage lasting cycling communities, and ride data and riders’ input were used to generate digital media exhibitions of the emerging collective mobility identity, serving as a basis for the current work.
The technology is being designed as a collaboration with industry partners RideAmigos, SudoMagic, and Sorkhabi International. The team also includes the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transit Authority (LA Metro) and the Duke University Center for Advanced Hindsight.
Fabian Wagmister (Film, Television and Digital Media), Principal Investigator. Co-PIs: Jeff Burke (Theater) and Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris (Luskin School of Public Affairs).
Supported by NSF Grant No. 2133309 (Stage 2), 2044034 (Stage 1).
2021-present.