Citizen Reportings and its Application to Bike Infrastructure Quality Assessment

Abstract

Digitalization gives new opportunities for citizen involvement. Local people can provide new insights in infrastructure shortcomings to support decision making. In this contribution we discuss how user generated data from municipal reporting systems can be used to support bike infrastructure quality assessment. The open accessible web portal EMSOs (EreignisMeldeSystem der Stadt Osnabrueck, Incident Reporting System of the City of Osnabrueck) is the specific usecase of this work. The Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) show when (potential) cyclists tend to use the reporting system to inform the administration about infrastructure shortcomings. The categorization of the portal could be misleading to many users as reportings may fit to several categories. Therefore, we classified the EMSOs reportings from 2021 to specific key words and topics that seem to be relevant to the users. The visualization shows several hotspots in the city where people complaining about parking violators or mud on the road. The work is embedded in the research project INFRASense that works on the development of a holistic quality assessment for bike paths. Based on reverse geocoding addresses and road names were identified from the geo coordinates. The related KPIs (e.g. reportings per meter) reveal road segments and streets that may be problematic from the user perspective. The contribution ends with a discussion how this process can be extended to other fields of interest and how it can be automatized to decrease the work load in processing citizen reporting data.