Giving A Beep About Safety: New Tech-Enabled Initiative Aims To Make London Safer For Cyclists Forget weapons or martial arts, all you need is a button on your bicycle to feel safe riding through streets of London.
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Forget weapons or martial arts, all you need is a button on your bicycle to feel safe riding through streets of London. The Give a Beep initiative by Swedish company Hövding (which produces airbags for cyclists) and PR platform Mynewsdesk aims to make cyclists' journey through London's urban roads safe and comfortable. By pressing a Flic button attached to the handlebars of a cycle, cyclists can "beep" out hazards whenever they feel unsafe or uncomfortable while riding through the streets of the city. Thanks to the button's connection to the cyclist's phone through Bluetooth, the location data is fed into a crowdsourced map with the aid of the Flic app, marking out routes considered hazardous for cyclists, while also collating data on environments where riders felt unsafe. Further, in order to make it more effective, each press of the button also triggers an email to be sent to the city's Mayor about the cyclists' situation.
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