The ECDF project "SimRa" (Safety in Cycling) has won the German Cycling Award 2022. Prof. Dr. David Bermbach accepted the award at a digital award ceremony on February 17, 2022. SimRa shares first place with the OpenBikeSensor project in the Service & Communication category.

With the help of the SimRa app, cyclists can record their journeys. The acceleration sensors of the smartphone are used to detect dangerous situations. "We were very pleased to be nominated together with such great projects. The joy of winning is of course huge!", explains David Bermbach, head of the project and professor at the Einstein Center Digital Future and TU Berlin.

With SimRa, Bermbach and his team want to make road traffic safer, and to do so they are relying on citizen science: "With our app, laypeople, in this case all cyclists, can systematically collect data. Subsequently, this data is made available to research and traffic planning in order to identify places where dangerous situations increasingly occur." This concept has already been working in Berlin since 2019 and has since been expanded to many other regions in Germany. As part of this expansion, the project has also started to work closely with other bicycle projects, for example the OpenBikeSensor from Stuttgart, as well as other universities, city governments and advocacy groups.

SimRa also has an important side effect in mind: "By making cycling safer, it also becomes more attractive, thus enabling CO2 emissions to be saved. In this way, we can contribute to greater sustainability in road traffic," says Bermbach. In addition, the project is also committed to Open Science, which means that all the data collected and the source code of the SimRa app are openly available and can also be used for other projects.

The German Bicycle Award is a nationwide competition to promote cycling in Germany and is being awarded for the 22nd time this year. The two professional awards in the categories Infrastructure and Service & Communication honor projects and measures that help to promote conditions for cycling in everyday life, leisure or tourism.