Bicycle riders increasingly utilize bicycle computers or cell phones equipped with GPS positioning to track and share their rides. These bicycle computers and online platforms typically contain a wealth of ride-specific information, such as speed, location, heart rate, pedaling cadence, and more. This information can be essential to forensic experts attempting to analyze bicycle movements in order to reconstruct bicycle crashes. However, there has been little research specifically discussing the positional accuracy of GPS systems for bicycles to date.
The purpose of this study is to examine the positional accuracy of several GPS units in real-world environments, including rural landscape and dense urban settings. The location data from portable GPS devices were compared to reference data recorded by a Racelogic VBox 3i with Real Time Kinematic (RTK). It was shown that the positional accuracy changed depending on the environment, and each GPS system resulted in slight differences in positional accuracy. Overall, the GPS systems tested had a positional accuracy that ranged between 5.76 and 13.66 ft when compared to the VBox 3i with RTK.