Volunteers Count Almost 700 Vehicles Blocking D.C. Bike Lanes in One Day

"[M]ore than 60 people spread out across DC for a coordinated effort to capture in real-time just how many cars and trucks block bike lanes during busy times," report Mark Sussman and Rachel Maisler.

The findings of that effort justify a lot of the public frustration of people on bikes about the inadequacies of painted bike lanes: "Volunteers submitted nearly 700 bike violations," on one day, May 15, 2019. That's "25% of the 2,900 citations that the city issued for blocked bike lanes in all of 2018," according to the article.

Volunteers used the How’s My Driving App to report the violations. "The app, launched in January, allows people to capture driving behavior like standing in a bike lane or blocking a crosswalk. The app draws data from the DC DMV website and shows the user a summary of how many tickets a vehicle has. It also generates a report they can tweet at DC 311," according to Sussman and Maisler.

The volunteers are calling the effort the Data-Protected Bike Lane project.