Context and objectives

Founded in 1983, the ECF advocates for more and better cycling across Europe. To support this mission, the federation needed a centralized way to monitor public infrastructure changes and provide evidence-based recommendations to its member organizations.

The existing solution worked at a limited scale but could not cover all European cities.

The ECF needed to:

• Adapt the current codebase to work at the European level

• Improve the infrastructure scoring methodology

• Deliver results in a format accessible to a broad, non-technical audience

Approach

1. Code optimization and scalable data collection

We started by refactoring the ECF's existing code to improve readability and performance, so it could scale to all European cities. Through rounds of agile implementation and code review, we developed precise scraping methods to gather and classify publicly available open data across multiple levels.

This systematic data collection formed the foundation for reliable infrastructure tracking across the continent.

2. Dashboard development and visualization

Using the data collected through web scraping, we built the back end for an interactive dashboard. We recommended the most appropriate data visualization layer to ensure easy, public, and free access to the results.

The main deliverables were:

• A CSV table with cleaned data, enabling the ECF to rank European cities by infrastructure score

• An interactive dashboard displaying metrics per year and city

• Source code to support future improvements

3. Roadmap for further improvement

We evaluated the best course of action to enhance the solution in a potential second phase, giving the ECF a clear path forward for continued development.

Results

The solution strengthened the ECF's ability to rank cities by infrastructure score and track yearly evolution, enabling better recommendations to its members.

The ECF highlighted that the solution brought:

• Speed in accessing up-to-date infrastructure data

• Flexibility to adapt to changing requirements

• Scalability across all European cities

• Cost-effectiveness compared to manual data collection

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This project was carried out under the auspices of our 1% for the Planet commitment. Learn more about what being a member means to us, and get involved.