Efficient infrastructure tracking at the European Cyclists’ Federation
Context & Objectives
Founded in 1983, the European Cyclists’ Federation (ECF) is a Brussels-based independent non-profit association dedicated to achieving more and better cycling for all in Europe.
The ECF needed a centralized approach to view public infrastructure changes and make recommendations to its members across Europe. Most urgently, they needed to adapt an existing solution to the European scale and improve the infrastructure scoring.
Approach
To allocate resources effectively, we set out to scrape websites and gather and classify publicly available, open data at many levels.
We used the following sequence for systematic data collection, to develop precise scraping methods and a simple, visual solution.
First, we optimized the client’s existing code and improved readability so that it could scale to all cities in Europe. We performed rounds of agile implementations and code reviews to ensure the solution fits their needs.
We then created the back end for an interactive dashboard using the data collected by web scraping. We recommended the most appropriate visualization layer to allow easy, public, and free access.
Finally, we evaluated the best course of action to improve the solution in a hypothetical second phase.
The main deliverables were:
A CSV table with cleaned data, enabling the client to rank European cities.
An interactive dashboard that displays the metrics per year and city.
Source code to make future improvements easier.
Results
The solution helps the ECF improve their ability to rank cities by infrastructure score and track yearly evolution to offer better recommendations to their members.
They cited the solution as bringing speed, flexibility, scalability, and cost-effectiveness to their decision processes.
This project was carried out under the auspices of our 1% for the Planet commitment. Learn more about what being a member means to us, and get involved.
