Post-geographic community policing: liberating bike lanes

17May07

An impressive site I came across today and plan to contribute to as soon as possible is MyBikeLane. It takes the Internet-aided name and shame approach towards an egregious offense plaguing American society today: illegal parking in bicycle lanes.

One complaint I forgot in my last post on NYC biking was this ubiquitous practice, which forces cyclists to veer out into traffic to avoid a vehicle sitting in their sacred lane. This website, which I first wrote off as the usual internet hijinx, meticulously catalogues photos of said parked cars as submitted by users (close to 500 in New York, the site is divided up by cities). While it seems that this is really just high-tech venting, the sophisticated use of this data actually could make a difference.

For one thing, it aggregates complaints by license plate – so there are automatically generated rankings of the worst offenders for each city. It also has uses a tagging system – you can see all the FedEx-related complaints, all idling cars (also a municipal offense here), etc. For good measure, all complaints have addresses so they can be mapped out easily.

If you read some of the comments thread, you can see there is real collaboration going on here – users call “how am I driving” complaint lines, present delivery companies with a batch of incriminating photos, and flag which cars will be instantly towed due to unpaid fines as soon police are notified. While the first offender has nothing to fear from MyBikeLane, I predict they will manage to annoy institutional offenders like taxi, limo and delivery companies enough to see some change. Even better is how this information could be used to lobby government for stricter penalties and better enforcement.

While this may seem quaint, I do seriously think this is another great example of the positive benefits of the Long Tail: it’s a small percentage of people who care about bike lane parking, but when the overall population size is large (New York City) and there are low communication/coordination costs (the Internet, and particularly, a well-designed site), good things happen.

If you want to see if I catch any bike-lane-parkers in action, check out my user profile (or for the tech-savvy, subscribe to my user feed).