USA
We're currently developing a new Love to Ride app.Â
The new app will include a host of new features, but its primary goal is to be the world's best app for automatically tracking bike rides.
The new app can automatically detect when you're riding a bike and will automatically log your rides to your Love to Ride profile.
There's no need to open the app, press start, or press stop, etc. All you need to do is allow the app to use your location and it does everything else for you!
This new app is essentially a ‘Fitbit’ for biking - much like a Fitbit automatically counts your steps without you having to press any buttons every time you walk, the new Love to Ride app does the same thing for bike riding.Â
The Love to Ride app...
*Soon we'll provide you with a heat map showing where people are riding in your city. This can be used by city planners and bike advocates to know where people are riding. Our ultimate aim is to be able to share rider generated 'comfort ratings' on each street segment. This data will help put forward the business case for adding more bike lanes in the areas where they’ll be of the greatest value changing cities across the world for the better.
The main aim is to further improve the accuracy of the app at detecting what mode of transport you are using.Â
We're also interested in your general experience of using the app, for general feedback on the quality of the app please head to 'More > Contact us' (within the app) or email product-team@lovetoride.net
In the app, you’ll be asked to ‘verify’ that the app has detected your mode of transport correctly. If it hasn't you can feedback on how you were actually travelling. You can also provide additional feedback and information to help us make the app even better.
By verifying your trips, you provide important information that is be used to improve the mode detection algorithm in the app.
We’ve programmed the app to automatically detect what mode of transport you’re using. This is largely done by taking a short accelerometer reading and then the mode detection algorithm calculates a probability rating for what mode you’re using to get from A to B. For example, if your phone is in your pocket as you ride your bike, the accelerometer will identify this unique pattern as bike riding and produce a confidence rating that it is biking (e.g. biking: 93% probability)
You’ll likely see a some ‘under construction’ messages when you try to use other features. The first thing we need to work well is automatic mode detection. While we’re refining the algorithm for mode detection we’ll be building out the other features of the app. The algorithm needs the most testing time, by getting feedback over the coming months from people like yourself, so we naturally focus on getting that ready for testing first. If you've got feature ideas, let us know.Â
We have designed and built the app to use a minimal amount of energy in order to preserve your phone’s battery life. Using GPS data is very battery intensive, so we only turn the GPS on when the app thinks you’re on a bike. This means that any non-bike trips will get their route information from what’s called ‘low accuracy location data’. This low accuracy data barely uses any power at all, however, as the name suggests, it’s not very accurate! This means that some of your non-bike trips (like walking and running especially) will have routes that are made up of zig-zagging lines. As this is a biking app, we’re OK with this, we just wanted you to know that this isn’t a bug and is one of the many measures we have in place to use minimal battery power.
That said, we always want to hear about trips that look really wrong, whether you were biking or not, so all trips have the option to provide feedback.
If you log into the app using Magic Link then the trips which the app generates will be linked to your real-life Love to Ride profile. There are some things to consider:Â
Love to Ride is absolutely committed to maintaining your privacy. Love to Ride databases are hosted by Amazon Web Service (AWS) Relational Database Service (RDS) in the Ireland region. The database runs within the Love to Ride Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and is inaccessible outside of the VPC. All data is encrypted in transit and at rest.
The Love to Ride app requires you to share your location in order for the auto bike trip logging to work. The app is optimised to accurately track your biking trips but it's important to note that the app does undertake low-accuracy tracking of other trips (walking, driving etc). These non-bike trips are retained and available for you to review or modify e.g. if we predicted a biking trip as a walking trip and you wish to update it.
You can delete any of your trips at any time (via the app or your web profile); once a trip is deleted it is destroyed and irrecoverable.
The app generates a detailed map view of your trips - only you can see these*. The location of your trips are never shared externally under any circumstance. If you use the app in a logged-in state then the distance, purpose and date of your bike trips will appear on your public Love to Ride profile.
*Note, if you report a trip as incorrect then you grant access for developers and the support team at Love to Ride to look at the trip in order to troubleshoot and understand what happened. This process is how our engineers are able to improve the performance of the app. If this is not acceptable to you, you may wish to exit the beta program and await our public launch.Â
Please do let us know what’s working well, not working so well yet, and your ideas for how we can improve the app and make it into your ideal biking app.
We believe that life is much better when we feel happy, healthy, energized, and connected to the people and places around us. We believe riding a bike has so many benefits to us individually, to our communities, and our world.
We know how good it feels to ride and we want more people to experience this feeling too.
To provide the best online platform and programs in the world for getting more people riding bikes.
Our platform and app are free for people everywhere.
We work with cities and businesses around the world that want to encourage and support more of their citizens and employees to gain the benefits of bike riding.Â
They pay us to:
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