Can-BICS uses the metrics of comfort and safety to establish a simplified and standardized naming convention for all bicycle facilities that can be used in public health research, surveillance, and cycling practice.
Cities use so many different names for the same bicycle facility — when we compiled bicycle infrastructure names used in open data from 44 Canadian municipalities and mapped them onto the Can-BICS nomenclature classification system, we found 269 unique facility names. This makes inter-city comparison of the type and quality of bicycle infrastructure incredibly difficult and labour intensive.
We developed Can-BICS — a classification system of five broad bicycle facilities assigned to three categories: high, medium, and low comfort, based on the facility’s contribution to user safety and comfort while cycling.
