BikeWise is a great new interactive resource for bicyclists to report incidents of crashes, safety hazards & thefts.  The idea is that anyone who is involved in or witness to an incident logs a report into the BikeWise database.  BikeWise then records & organizes those incidents by city, state and country and displays them on an interactive google map.  You, as a cyclist can pull up a map for any area or view a list of incident reports. From Worldchanging:

Although the site’s creators are based in Seattle, this tool is available for cyclists everywhere. The site (with about 90 percent accuracy) can sense your location, and will pull up information for the city you are surfing the web from. I think it’s great that Bikewise has created a space for people to talk to each other about how to make their city a better place. The trick will be getting enough users to generate reports to make the data useful for people like city planners, analysts and public policy officials. So, if you’re a cyclist, head to Bikewise and get the conversation started!

That last point is critical – as of today, there are only 11 states reporting any accidents, 18 reporting hazards and incidents, and in total there are maybe a few dozen incidents reported for 2009 in the whole US.  Hopefully word will spread so this tool can be put to use.  If the BikeWise developers are correct in saying that over 75% of cycling crashes go unreported, then no wonder city planners keep ignoring our pleas for bike-safe roadways.

It looks like the site is still a work in progress.  The interactive maps are pretty user-friendly, but the incident reporting could use some organizational improvements, like organize by date, incident type, etc.  It would be especially useful to planners & city officials to be able to download the database info into an excel spreadsheet of some sort.  Maybe this is in the works.

So…let’s start reporting!