With at least a dozen bicycling deaths on London roads this year, the hazards of two-wheeled transit remain a major urban issue. Incidents such as the constant antagonism between cyclists and ticket-happy cops in New York – as well as the Addison Lee cab company vs. cyclists debacle in London – have caused ongoing civic tensions with legitimate arguments on both sides. So as long as accidents, citations and their accompanying legal battles are commonplace, there remains a genuine need for accountability and transparency, perhaps, to help tip the scales more fairly in favour of bicyclists.

One L.A. company's answer to the call is Rideye, a simple, highly rugged CNC machined bicycle ‘black box’ equipped with an accident sensor. The device captures a continuous 2.5 hours of video, cut off at the point it either senses an accident or is stopped by the push of a button, which should serve to help bicyclists involved in road incidents. As icing on the cake, the device also makes a pretty cool ride along cam and easily connects to a computer like a standard digital camera. With a little less than a month to go, Rideye has already surpassed its $32,000 goal on Kickstarter.

Until bicycle policy and infrastructure in the rest of the world catch up with Copenhagen, it’s great to see so many designers addressing bicycle-related issues with such ingenuity. In many ways, products like Rideye and the Helios smart bike system mirror the passive safety features of cars. And we know that when things fit easily into our lives, we use and thus benefit from them much more.