Bicyclists nationwide and in San Diego can use this app to report blocked bike lanes

SAN DIEGO (FOX 5/KUSI) — An app using self-reporting data to increase awareness and create safer bike lanes worldwide is drawing support in San Diego.

There’s more than 1,300 miles of bikeways in the San Diego region, but as many bicyclists will tell you, they don’t always feel the safest riding them. Not only do they deal with distracted drivers and bumps in the road, but they also deal with blocked bike lanes.

An app aims to help create a clear path for bicyclists.

However, instead of being kept clear, Christina Whitehouse says many bike lanes are being used for “parking and traveling.”

After Whitehouse was nearly hit by a commercial truck while riding her bike in Chicago, she created the app — Bike Lane Uprising.

The app allows users to upload photos and share a location where a bike lane is blocked, not only alerting other bicyclists, but also keeping data to alert companies that are repeat offenders nationwide.

Minute by minute, the app’s live databases are updated.

“From the data submitted by bicyclists, those bike lane obstructions, they include photos, they include information about the entities that are blocking the bike lanes as well as the location… From that we are able to identify hotspots, unsafe bike lanes,” Whitehouse said.

Some of the San Diego hot spots include 30th Street in North Park, J Street in the Gaslamp Quarter, and along PCH near Little Italy, just to name a few.

But, Whitehouse said they take the data even further than just alerting local riders.

“From that data, it’s aggregated into a national database, so a lot of the companies that use bike lanes as like their free distribution, free parking, we’re able to look at those on a national level. A lot of the companies that are doing this in San Diego, they’re doing it in other cities. And we are able to use this data to show the companies that there needs to be some safety improvements in their policies,” Whitehouse added.

Many bicyclists take pictures while on their ride, and then upload them to the app afterwards, including Anar Salayev, the executive director of Bike San Diego.

“You will see a ton of USPS trucks, UPS trucks, delivery trucks in general, you have a lot of Uber, Lyft, DoorDash drivers also park there, either waiting for a passenger or waiting to pick up food. It’s almost a given, so I expect it at this point, and because of that I anticipate having to merge into traffic pretty regularly on my commute,” Salayev said.

In early 2024, the City of San Diego paid out nearly $3 million to the family of a bicyclist who crashed into a city stormwater truck, which was parked in a bike lane.

“We’ve seen in San Diego that parking and driving and using bike lanes for their unintended purposes has led to bicyclist injuries and fatalities, so this is a real issue, and the biking community in San Diego wants it to be addressed,” Whitehouse stated.

This comes at a time when biking is booming. According Streetlight Data, a company who monitors transportation analytics, biking jumped 71% in San Diego when compared to data from before the pandemic.

“San Diego comes in as the second fastest growing metro for biking activity in 2022, and then also its per capita ranking also jumps up,” Director of Content for Streetlight, Emily Adler, said in an interview with FOX 5/KUSI Tuesday.

Of the 651 bike lane obstructions in the San Diego region, as of July 23, 41% were from private vehicles, while 39% were a company vehicle, and 12% a municipal/city or USPS vehicle.

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