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This GPS Sensor for Your Bike Could Save Lives, Fix Potholes, and Fight Theft

The FBI pegs stolen bicycles as a $350 million a year black market. As nearly any cyclist can tell you, it's a rampant issue. More importantly, more than 40,000 cyclists a year are injured, and hundreds die. Our team thinks we can help warn cyclists of potentially dangerous areas, and maybe even save a life or two, while also doing something about stolen bikes.


Our product, the BikeSpike, is fixed securely to the frame of a bicycle, and provides location and vibration information to the cyclist via a native iPhone, Android, and Web interface. We've heard our fair share of stories about the difficulties of retrieving, or even reporting a bike stolen, so we wanted to simplify this process by providing cyclists with all of the essential information about their bicycle in an easy-to-share format that can be provided to police departments and social networks.

Our device also includes an accelerometer that allows a user to inform others in the event of a crash, and sends location information along with it. In addition to providing location information about a bike, we want to allow the United State's estimated 58 million cyclists a way to help each other, and the community as a whole. By providing anonymous location information to city planners, cyclists can be a part of urban planning.

We'd like to see a future for cyclists in which bike lane placement can be prioritized for the busiest streets, bumpy bike lanes can be marked as in need of repair, and cities can properly account for their true number of cyclists. The government currently has more than $500 million dollars available for cities interested in promoting cycling. We want to make sure that every dollar gets used as efficiently as possible. If you want to get behind a project that will promote cyclists' safety and help change the way they get around, support our Kickstarter page. If more efforts are made to keep cyclists safer, it might encourage more non-cyclists to try commuting via bike.

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This project will be featured on GOOD's Saturday series Push for Good—our guide to crowdfunding creative progress.

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