Use Cases

There are two primary use case buckets on which the work of NC-BPAID focuses.

Asset Inventories

This bucket includes use cases that need more detailed information on what infrastructure exists, where it is sited and what its attributes are, including condition, surface material and other aspects related to maintenance. These use cases also need to be able to relate bicycle, pedestrian and accessibility infrastructure to other nearby infrastructure, including roadway centerlines and transit stops and stations. They center around being able to better understand and manage existing transportation infrastructure.

Examples of use cases identified include:

• Asset management
• Destination accessibility
• Infrastructure performance management
• Intermodal connectivity analyses
• Public health planning
• Safety analysis
• Safety-related inventorying
• Traffic operations
• Transportation planning and decision making
• Transportation service siting (micromobility, transit, etc.)
• Universal accessibility analysis

This bucket of use cases is expected to align more with a linear referencing system (LRS) or similar approach, in which attributes of nearby bike, pedestrian and accessibility infrastructure are assigned to linear geospatial features that represent roadway centerlines.

Routing

This bucket includes use cases that need information about connectivity, travel direction and other attributes of infrastructure such as width and grade that can help travelers determine if they are able to take the route given the way they move –- whether they’re walking, traveling with small children and strollers, or rolling in a wheelchair. These use cases focus on helping travelers and transportation planners take a more detailed look at how and where people move.

Examples of use cases identified include:

• Destination accessibility / reachability
• Paratransit pathway review
• Public health planning
• Routing, navigation and wayfinding (provided to travelers via apps built by the private, academic and nonprofit sectors)
• Safety analysis
• Travel demand modeling and analysis
• Travel monitoring
• Universal accessibility analysis
• User-specific pathway routing

This bucket of use cases is expected to align more with a graph network representation, in which sidewalks, bike lanes and other routes are represented as geospatial linear features, and curb cuts, signals and other smaller infrastructure at a specific point are represented as nodes. Some graph network representations represent intersections and crosswalks as nodes. Other representations use geospatial polygons instead of lines to show the space taken up by the infrastructure, as well as its specific placement.

Process

These use cases were defined through a phased process:

• In March 2024, members of NC-BPAID participated in a brainstorming session to generate use case ideas and begin to consider what kind of data would be needed. See the notes from this session in the Use Case Discovery - Summary.
• In the summer and fall of 2024, the use cases were further detailed and new use cases added, then the use cases were grouped by type and found to fall primarily into the two buckets above. Download a copy of the Use Case Matrix (last updated 4/8/2025) to dig into individual use cases in more depth.

As NC-BPAID’s work evolves, our definition of use cases may also be updated.