Methodology
Introduction
One of the tasks of this work is to measure how "fluid" a bike ride is as a proxy for the overall quality of the bike-lane using just accelerometer data. To this end, a cell phone running Open Street Cam is mounted to the handlebars of a bike and used the phone's sensors to measure the activity in 3 axes (X, Y, Z). Fluidity implies a riding experience that has the least amount of abrupt shocks along the way. An highly fluid bike ride is a straight line along a bike lane, with no interruptions, no bumps, no sudden shifts in directions or the need to suddenly apply the brakes. Large variations in accelerometer readings indicates that a bike ride along a street segment is not fluid at that point. We also assume that the quality of the bike ride depends heavily on the overall quality of the bike-lane where that bike rides takes place.
Accelerometer data