João Pimentel Ferreira, a "engineer who likes to program to occupy his free time", author of the Parking Complaint app, has launched a new application with the same aim of facilitating communication between citizens and the police authorities. It's called Bike Reporter and this time the aim is to help report situations caused by motorists who have put cyclists' lives at risk.
"I've had a lot of complaints from indignant people who think I'm contributing to the phenomenon of the slanderous whistleblower, read 'snitch', but the goal was really to increase civic participation and help clear the sidewalks for people with reduced mobility, such as the elderly"says João in an e-mail to Lisboa Para Pessoas. "And of the thousands of complaints I've seen (I do this to avoid abuse), I haven't seen a single abusive or strictly libelous one. Bike Reporter was on the same principle, but applied to bicycles."
Whether it's a failure to give way, running a red light or dangerous overtaking at a distance of less than 1.5 meters, this application, which was born "in synergy with MUBi"can help the cyclist to send a report to the police, helping to describe the situation and preparing an e-mail that can be sent immediately and conveniently. John tells us that he had "I asked to adapt this app to report parking for dangerous overtaking of cyclists, which is a recurring and illegal occurrence, but it was something that was completely outside the scope of parking, so I created this Bike Reporter app, which MUBi wanted to join. And in fact they have helped me in many details."
The development of the application was shared with the community in the MUBi forum and the app is available in open source on GitHub. Android users can download Bike Reporter to their smartphone (an iOS version is not available). A Parking Complaint application was launched in 2017 and follows similar mechanics: in this case, users can take a photo of a badly parked vehicle, fill in some details and finally send an email to the authorities with all the formalized details. This app is also available in open source.
