Commuting with EUC's study

[Paco Gorina]

In Spain we have formed an Asociación de Usuarios  de Mobilidad Personal (User Association of Personal Mobility) and in talks with the administration, shops we are seeing the lack of hard data when talking with the administrations. This is specially important now that many cities are defining bicycle lanes and other restricted ways,

We believe that EUC's are a great commuting device, cheap and environment friendly and very easy to use with public transport but lack real data how people are using the devices, how are their driving styles and we need a lot of information about security and specially breaking/stopping.

We would like to use applications like Gyrometrics or WheelLog to get anonymized data with a minimum fuss for the user (of course some involvement is always needed, as selecting when is a commuting ride, a pleasure one or just le's go to make the speed record ).

Most of the information should come from the analysis of speed and distance data, as fast accelerations/deccelerations may define a driving style or an incident.

Not all EUC's are giving the same data but speed, distance, battery use and current are available in most. Pitch may also be interesting to detect some situations.

I would like all people that think it is an interesting project, useful for the community to gent in contact in this topic to allow defining :

• Concret objectives (ex: Defining driving styles, number of incidents per km/mile, distances traveled, breaking performances, etc...)
• Analysis methods that may be able to help (statistical, classification, etc.)
• Base data we would need
• Anonymization methods to be used and recruitment protocols
• ... 

Please see that there are really two big groups of concepts :

• Technical (ex.: Breaking performance...) 
• Social (ex.: How we use them, driving etiquette...)

Bridging the gap may provide a great tool to talk with the administrations and the designers of the EUC to not only get better machines or more suited to our use but also convince the administration of its future as a good personal transport system.

Thanks to everybody and really excited to start this new project

 

 

[ALinCuenca]

Good luck with that project Paco. I live in Cuenca Castilla La Mancha. I've attracted the attention of the police when riding my EUC - we have several roads that are shared between vehicles and pedestrians, and the police told me off for riding on one such road, and told me to go on the pavement - but people are walking on the road and pavement. There are other roads where there isn't a separate pavement - am I supposed to carry my wheel up such roads?

The other thing I worry about is, in the future there's bound to be accidents where someone's wheel goes out of control and hits someone or a car. It's so easy to have a false sense of security, which is what happened to me, and my wheel went out of control, but thankfully no third-party was involved. So I now ride my wheel with a strap when near pedestrians or vehicles. 

So I think people need guidelines and recommendations before learning the hard way. So I'm pleased with your initiative. Suerte:)

[Gil]

Bigdata meets EUCs !!

In order to help analysis, it would be useful to be able, for each path segment, whether you ride on roadway, bicycle lane or sidewalk. I mean that knowing that the EUCist drove at 16km/h is interesting but, on the pavement is not the same as on the sidewalk in terms of threats to pedestrians.

[Paco Gorina]

On 10/1/2017 at 10:16 PM, Gil said:

Bigdata meets EUCs !!

In order to help analysis, it would be useful to be able, for each path segment, whether you ride on roadway, bicycle lane or sidewalk. I mean that knowing that the EUCist drove at 16km/h is interesting but, on the pavement is not the same as on the sidewalk in terms of threats to pedestrians.

Agree but it is really difficult without user help. One posiblility is to add a "sidewalk/pavement" switch in the application that also activates different speed alarm. sidewalk alarm is general for all wheels.

I have some documentation about driving style for cars (digesting it :() It uses :

- Accelerations / Decelerations

- Fast Turns

 

I think fast turns is useless to us but accelerations/deccelerations could be a good and easy to get indicator.

[Gil]

It was pure brainstorming... The sidewalk/pavement switch would be more accurate but would rarely be used (not safe...). Accelerations/decelerations can only be considered as a clue. In my town, sidewalks are very large and almost desert by night. My driving is smoother on those side-walks than on most pavements.

One idea could be that some very involved contributors would produce a video along technical logs. With a few tens of those videos you could produce a very very good behaviour analysis.  

Concerning speed alarms, generally speaking, I think that we must not mix data collection features and every day features. If the app changes speed alarms on side-walks, it will influence the rider's behaviour, then bias your analysis (Heisenberg uncertainty principle at work !!!).

[Paco Gorina]

Another idea is to use current. It should correlate with the "Speed pedal" in a car. Big fast short negative values means braking hard. Not so easy to difference between climbing and accelerating.