Prior to the commencement of the PBIN project, there was no standard terminology or convention for bicycle and pedestrian facility GIS information. Additionally, there was no central (statewide) storage location for data concerning existing and planned facilities. NCDOT recognized the need to document existing and planned facilities for purposes of planning and reporting.
In the first two phases of the PBIN project, from 2012 to 2014, North Carolina State University’s ITRE worked to establish an initial statewide geodatabase of bicycle and pedestrian facilities by asking a broad range of agencies across the state for relevant data. ITRE reached out to all 100 counties in North Carolina, as well as 37 regional planning agencies and municipalities with populations greater than 5,000 residents. The data received was combined with existing data acquired through NCDOT and from other state agencies.
A third phase occurred in 2019 with the launching of NCDOT's ATLAS project. This involved both data solicitation efforts and extensive digitization of bicycle and pedestrian facilities along roadway corridors throughout the state.
A fourth phase occurred between 2022 and 2024. This involved both digitization of existing crosswalks and sidewalks, as well as solicitation of data. All GIS data from any relevant planning study was also incorporated into the planned facility portion of the dataset.
A fifth phase was completed in 2026 and provided a fully comprehensive (statewide) dataset of PBIN features. NCDOT-maintained roads were manually reviewed statewide using several sources of aerial imagery for redundancy and currency. Pedestrian and bicycle facilities identified from aerial imagery as not yet recorded by PBIN were digitized in GIS and added to the dataset. Supplemental, machine-learning (computer vision model)-derived data provided valuable leads to facilities for review and subsequent digitization and integration with PBIN.
