Created by Stephan Fickas and Marc Schlossberg, both professors at the University of Oregon, Bike Connect is a system designed to streamline bike rides by triggering traffic lights.

The app worked roughly 80 percent of time in the first round of testing. The hardest part will be getting cities to incorporate it into their infrastructure.

Two professors from the University of Oregon—Stephen Fickas, Ph.D., a professor of computer and information science, and Marc Schlossberg, Ph.D., a professor of city and regional planning—are looking beyond just improving bike lanes to encourage riding as a form of transportation.

So they have created a system known as Bike Connect, which is designed to communicate with traffic signals along highly utilized bike lanes. The goal? To streamline a cyclist’s ride by triggering upcoming traffic lights to turn green.



Traffic signals are currently triggered by vehicles when they pass over loop detectors under the pavement at intersections. Cyclists trigger them too, but many don’t realize it. Plus, traffic signals are only timed to the speed of vehicles, not cyclists. That means that green lights don’t give cyclists the time they need once they’ve triggered the light the same way cars do.

“Even in the third best biking city in the U.S., there’s not a single traffic signal timed to the speed of a cyclist,” Schlossberg told Bicycling, referring to Eugene, Oregon, where their system was tested.

The Bike Connect system is currently made up of a smartphone app that communicates with a special control box that integrates with existing traffic signal hardware. Fickas and Schlossberg made sure their control box was affordable and easy to reproduce—it cost roughly $200 to make using off-the-shelf parts, no soldering required. According to Fickas, it also comes with a cellular connection to the cloud for $3 a month. (They even worked with a local high school robotics team to build their own box.)

The control box being tested in the lab, before being installed on the traffic signal. Courtesy of Stephen Fickas

Bike Connect is designed to not only prompt traffic lights to turn green, but to also show cyclists that the traffic light knows they’re approaching. The cyclist using the smartphone app will no longer have to wonder if the light ahead will change—the app will tell them if it will. It uses color coded notifications to inform riders about the status of the traffic signal.

The project is still in early stages of development, but underwent nine months of testing by 10 people. The control box was installed on a traffic light at an intersection along a busy bike corridor in Eugene. During testing, they determined that it works roughly 80 percent of the time.

One reason for the not-quite-perfect score? Traffic signals have a set maximum time for staying green. In busy times when other cyclists have already triggered the signal, Bike Connect testers could encounter a red light, since the traffic light has already reached its max green time for that cycle. (Fickas and Schlossberg think that the city should significantly increase these max times to make bicycling more efficient, especially along popular bike corridors.)

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Schlossberg himself was one of the app testers. “It was a lot of fun knowing that I, as I was biking, was communicating with the traffic signal,” he said. “As a cyclist, just knowing that the signal knew I was there was huge.”

Fickas and Schlossberg are currently working on getting the app to communicate even more information to the cyclist, such as if they should speed up or slow down when approaching a light. They’d also like to eventually develop a device that goes directly on the bike, and they’ve been experimenting with using LEDs on handlebars.

“Our goal is to not have anything with a screen. We don’t want riders distracted,” Schlossberg said. “Instead, we’d like it to be audio or vibration based, or both, to communicate basic information.”

While the app should be ready in the near future, its availability to the general public largely depends upon cities deciding to incorporate this new technology. Eugene has already agreed to allow Bike Connect boxes to be installed on more traffic signals. Other cities may not be as willing, though the system is affordable and easy to reproduce.

As for down the line, Fickas and Schlossberg also hope to expand their research to address how cars can communicate with bikes and vice versa. Newer cars can already communicate with each other, and since that’s where the future lies, bikes will need a way of being recognized in that system, too.

Jessica Coulon Assistant Digital Editor When she’s not out riding her mountain bike, Jessica reports on news, gear, and all things cycling related for Bicycling.

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