Novel ways of proving cycle journeys travelled?

[Angelfishsolo]

or on someone elses bike. You could earn a fortune as a "GPS Mule" for fat city types.

Enter the Biometrics concept.

 

[summerdays]

A GPS device would be easy to produce however, people could just stick it on their cars. I know the patterns would look different on quieter roads, but in city centres, the raw GPS data would look versimilar with the average speeds and stop/starts.

The data for a bike would be different ... the top speed achieved, whether the speed was affected by hills, if the GPS went into a petrol station on a regular amount consistent with mileage covered. There may even be bits such as whether the GPS track had used a bus route unavailable for cars, or did it tend to get very near the lights at most junctions (or shock horror not actually seem to stop at any set of lights). Even the route taken as I would take a different route in the car to a bike due to hills, and probably choosing quieter back street roads).

Anyone with suspious logs could be asked to ride the route and do show the same amount of acceleration, and complete it in a similar time (that would be worth seeing anyway )

 

[summerdays]

or on someone elses bike. You could earn a fortune as a "GPS Mule" for fat city types.

Hmm that would have to be built into the system or imagine there could be one cyclist with 20 GPS devices logging his journey to work ... so there would need to be checks in to see for duplicate routes ... but then how would it cope with two people cycling together? Though they probably wouldn't have absolutely identical logs.

 

[Red Light]

The much discussed Cyclemeter iPhone app plots your route with GPS and uploads it to Google Maps for you.

 

[Dan B]

There's just as much justification for paying people to walk as there is to cycle - which makes me think that you could achieve the same end by simply paying them not to drive

Mathematically you could achieve that by charging them when they fail to not drive - as we do already in the form of fuel tax, congestion charges etc. But I think psychologically the carrot beats the stick, so perhaps some form of "car tax reclaim" where you would send in your odometer reading with the car tax renewal and get a discount if it was below average.

 

[Markymark]

I maintain that in a city centre (which to be honest is where the biggest need to cut congestion is), it would be too diffiuclt to correctly identify the difference between cars and bikes. There would too great a margin of error and overlapping of typical car/typical bike journeys.

Yes, if they had the resources to analise each individual journey, then possibly, but the resources required would be excessive and wasteful.

The easier thing to do is simply make car jouneys more expensive. They already do this - high tax on petrol and congestion charge in central London. As someone who used to drivce in every day, I now alternate between the bike and the tube. I am guessing the system is working due to the much larger number of cyclists on the road as I am sure a large number are there due to the financial reasons as well as fitness.

EDIT Dan B - you beat me to it!

 

[Angelfishsolo]

There's just as much justification for paying people to walk as there is to cycle - which makes me think that you could achieve the same end by simply paying them not to drive

Mathematically you could achieve that by charging them when they fail to not drive - as we do already in the form of fuel tax, congestion charges etc. But I think psychologically the carrot beats the stick, so perhaps some form of "car tax reclaim" where you would send in your odometer reading with the car tax renewal and get a discount if it was below average.

Which you almost certainly lead to "clocking" unless the car has the GPS black box fitted. I wonder how long it would take for somebody to come up with a device that jammed the GPS signal?

 

[summerdays]

I maintain that in a city centre (which to be honest is where the biggest need to cut congestion is), it would be too diffiuclt to correctly identify the difference between cars and bikes. There would too great a margin of error and overlapping of typical car/typical bike journeys.

Cars journeys in town centres are much more start stop than cycle journeys, we all know we've done it where we have continually overtaken the same car at sets of lights where they are stuck in a large queue and we just carry on past them to stop far closer to the lights, so a cyclist would normally make it through a set of lights in one cycle whereas the car driver may be stuck there longer, also cars get stuck behind traffic waiting to turn where there is often enough space for the cyclist to continue. I still think that the two journeys could be told apart.

 

[marinyork]

I maintain that in a city centre (which to be honest is where the biggest need to cut congestion is), it would be too diffiuclt to correctly identify the difference between cars and bikes. There would too great a margin of error and overlapping of typical car/typical bike journeys.

It's a bit more nuanced than that. You can reasonably tell the difference between the two accepting errors (as anything in life). The question is whether the time worth doing it is worth it and how accepting you are of errors compared to the current system. I would say the time worth doing it probably isn't worth doing when scaled (you'd need random checks to try and save time) whereas I'd say a not especially low error rate is acceptable vs the current system for other reasons.