As the weather warms up, it's a perfect time to get on your bike and get active. We wanted to share with you three exciting new apps for our bike riding community - Bike Party, Virtuous Cycle, and Tern - which were delivered in response to the Transport for NSW (Transport) Active Transport Bike Riding Innovation Challenge (ATBRIC).

Bike riding is one of the most sustainable modes of travel and contributes to improving neighbourhoods and the environment, reducing car use and traffic congestion, supporting local economies, and improving the general health of our communities. It is a good alternative to driving, reducing traffic and congestion, and provides health benefits and cost savings. 

Barriers preventing people from choosing bike riding for non-leisure journeys over other transport modes were identified and include knowledge of safe cycling routes and biking-related laws. To help address these barriers, Transport launched ATBRIC in May 2021 with the aim of developing apps that make bike riding from A to B an easy and fun experience. 

Transport used this challenge to ask innovators to come up with a data or technology focused solution to make bike riding easy, fun, and to promote the use of bike riding as a practical mode of non-leisure transport. 

From many great pitches, three final solutions were selected and developed into apps which are now available for download. 

Let's take a closer look at these exciting solutions.

Bike Party
Bike Party is aimed at making cycling safer and more social.

We spoke to Anthony Joseph, Bike Party Founder, about the features of the app, the idea behind it and the development process. 

“Bike Party makes cycling safer and more social by introducing cyclists to other cyclists commuting to work or study. After answering a couple of questions in the app about yourself and where you need to get to, Bike Party will show you cyclists travelling to the same destination.” 

“We are made by beginner cyclists for beginner cyclists: you don’t need to be an elite athlete to join a bike party! We also help you plan your commute from home to study or work by giving you the best time to leave based on what time you need to arrive at your destination.” 

Bike Party aims to reduce the risks involved in commuting via bike by promoting group bike riding.   “It's typically safer to cycle in a group. In urban environments you’re allowed to cycle two abreast, so you’re more visible to other road users and are with others who could help in the event of an accident.”  Anthony says incubation through the ATBRIC has been crucial to Bike Party’s development.   “The incubation process has been an essential part of Bike Party’s success so far. The incubation process has given us early market validation of our service as well as support with industry and government stakeholders. The incubation encouraged us to stay organised and ensure we had good product/market fit early on in the process.”   Bike Party runs regular parties in the Sydney Metropolitan area with the support of the cycling community and aims to add additional features such as live commute routing and more options for finding bike parties.

Read more and sign up on the Bike Party website.  

Tern
Tern is a free app that gamifies and rewards cycling, walking and running from A to B. Albert Still, Tern Founder, spoke to us about the inspiration for the app and how it works.  

“The active commute is such a good life hack: it’s green, cheaper, healthier and often faster. I started to think if I could use my skills as an app developer to help gamify, socialise and reward this behaviour.” 

Tern was developed with this goal in mind, and as such has several useful features for active commuters like automatic commute detection.  

“Knowing that a commute is something we do up to ten times a week, I knew it would be cumbersome to require users to manually start and stop an app every time. Therefore I turned to passive technology: the app uses artificial intelligence and battery conscious background tracking to automatically detect cycling, walking and running in and out the workplace, a bit like a step counter.” 

Privacy and data protection are paramount. Users can select the level of route detail they are happy to share. Tern’s infrastructure is hosted on a world leading, state of the art cloud provider which ensures compliance with key industry security standards, and the app has undergone penetration testing as a standard part of the Open Data Innovation Challenge incubation process. 

Tern uses gamification and office CO2 leaderboards to further enhance the user experience.  “Once you start clocking commutes you can view your progress over time and compare your active commute stats against others in your office, city and the world.”  “To date Tern has clocked over 22,000 commutes and 150,000 green kilometres on the platform, and we’re excited about growing as commuters and workplaces become more sustainable, and the world realises the car is not always the answer.”  Tern is available for free download via the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. Interested businesses can learn more on their website.

Virtuous Cycle
Our final solution, Virtuous Cycle, comes from app development company Eat More Pixels. Virtuous Cycle was developed to encourage regular bike riding by making it both easy and fun to get into bike riding regularly. Virtuous Cycle is a new mobile app created for the Active Transport Bike Riding Innovation Challenge. The Challenge process enabled Eat More Pixels to iterate on initial ideas and ensure Virtuous Cycle features are engaging and useful. 

We spoke to Eat More Pixels Co-Founder Jimmy Ti about Virtuous Cycle.  

The app offers four primary features to help both new and experienced bike riders to take up regular bike riding.

Easy bike route search: “Virtuous Cycle can search for bike routes for any destinations in NSW easily, and each route is presented in an easy-to-read map view with up to three variations to suit bike riders with different levels of experience.”  Bite-sized learning goals: “There are many essential biking-related laws and useful information which is formatted to be mobile-friendly and turned into small learning goals to help our users to learn whenever they have some free time.    Useful bike ride records: “Users can record their bike rides in Virtuous Cycle to measure the various positive impacts their bike rides have on their own health and their environment with metrics such as calories burned and carbon savings.”  Fun awards and challenges: “Users can earn awards (and bragging rights!) when they record bike rides and complete learning goals in Virtuous Cycle. New badges will be added periodically to encourage users to take up bike riding regularly.”

“Virtuous Cycle has gone through a few design iterations and updates thanks to the feedback we have received from testers. We think these redesigns and improvements are making Virtuous Cycle a much better and useful app for all its users. The technical help we received in terms of using and integrating Trip Planner API made it possible for us to implement bike route search seamlessly in Virtuous Cycle.” 

Virtuous Cycle is available for download on iOS. You can learn more about Eat More Pixels on their website. 

A big thank you to Anthony, Albert and Jimmy for their time!

That’s a wrap on our ATBRIC solutions. Stay up to date with future innovation challenges via our mailing list and X page (formerly known as Twitter).