How Safe Is Your Bike Ride? Using Open Data to Find Better Routes

Urban planning researcher Peter Furth developed a framework called Level of Traffic Stress (LTS) to measure how stressful streets are for cyclists. Using street data from OpenStreetMap, Tajairi Brown-Neuson applied this framework to rate every street in NYC on a scale of 1–4, based on characteristics like speed limits, number of lanes, and presence of protected bike lanes (1 being most comfortable, 4 being least). They then layered in data from Open Data NYC: fatal and severe injury incidents, plus 311 complaints to identify areas with high double-parking frequency. The result is a map that helps cyclists identify the safest routes—and highlights where infrastructure improvements are most needed.