Scarborough resident Josh Fox holds the device he invented that alerts bicyclists to vehicles approaching behind them. Drew Johnson / Leader

A Scarborough resident’s invention to make biking busy roads safer is gaining traction.

Josh Fox said he first thought of the idea for Survue, a device that alerts cyclists when a vehicle approaches behind them, seven years ago when he lived in Illinois.

“My daughter was 1 at the time,” he said. “I loved sticking her in the little bike trailer and taking her for a ride on this bike trail.”

But there was one major obstacle: a busy road.

“It was just tall curbs, cars flying. You couldn’t escape,” Fox said. “We just have to do this one little stretch to get to this nice natural resource and I started to feel like it was just too risky to do it.”

Meanwhile, Fox, an engineer, was mentoring a high school robotics team, and the idea of creating a device himself was “just there looming for a few years,” he said.

After moving to Scarborough, Fox decided to give it a go.

“I started by just taking my phone and literally duct-taping it to my bike, recording a video, and then running it through an open-source algorithm to see what happens,” Fox said.

The Survue device records approaching vehicles, interprets their speed, flashes a red light when a driver is too close, and differentiates vehicle types, giving different alerts for each. Contributed / Josh Fox

Fox then began tinkering in his basement. The algorithms grew more and more efficient in pinpointing the location of a vehicle and predicting its future movements. The battery got better and smaller so the device was eventually small enough “that a cyclist would be willing to stick it on their bike,” Fox said.

The next step was acquiring funding for mechanical and electrical engineering from the Maine Technology Institute and, in order to do so, Fox needed to provide insight into the market.

“I just started going to local bike shops. Everybody was supportive and willing to chat with me and there was interest,” Fox said. “That gave me assurance from a marketing and sales perspective that I was onto something, so that got us the funding to really start to make it more of a product than an idea.”

Cyclemania in Portland was one of those shops. They went on to demo an early version of Survue.

“It gives you a good sense of traffic coming behind you,” said Ben Sawyer, Cyclemania general manager. “There’s a certain peace of mind of knowing cars are coming before you can even hear them.”

Ultimately, Sawyer said, the danger stems from non-bike-friendly infrastructure in towns and cities and that needs to change to fully address the issue.

Paul Drinan, active transportation director at the Bicycle Coalition of Maine, agrees but said Fox’s device is a useful tool for coping with current conditions.

“Anything that increases cyclist safety is welcome by the Bicycle Coalition,” Drinan said.

Bryan Gallant, manager at Gorham Bike & Ski in Saco, also weighed in on the device.

“I was blown away by how much more aware it made me,” Gallant said. “I’m a very comfortable cyclist, but I was much more conscious of what was going on around me, and it has been great to be able to give him the feedback and watch the product change as they were tweaking.”

There is a growing market for products like Survue, Gallant said, and the Saco shop sells similar devices on a weekly basis. However, those are made by “heavy hitters” of the industry, he said, and Survue could develop an edge when it reaches the local market “because it is a small … Maine-based product.”

Fox acknowledged there are similar products out there, but said Survue has something that sets it apart.

“One of the things that differentiates us is that we’re looking specifically for vehicles,” Fox said. “We can specify different alerts for different vehicles, so we can give an additional alert if it’s a large semi-truck, for instance, rather than just a small sedan.”

Fox secured the MTI funding and developed a device that could record approaching vehicles, interpret their speed, flash a red light when a driver is too close, and differentiate vehicles, providing distinctive alerts for different kinds. It can also be synced with an app on the bicyclist’s smartphone to show them where vehicles are rather than just alerting them by sound.

But Survue needed one more financial push to bring it to fruition, Fox said.

So, Fox started a Kickstarter campaign in January with a goal of raising $5,000. Progress was slow until last month when Fox News published an article on Survue online. Within days, he had exceeded his goal by thousands of dollars.

“It was a pretty wild couple of days,” Fox said.

As of Tuesday, the campaign has raised over $45,000.

With a patent pending, Fox will continue to improve and test the product in the coming months, he said, and a timeline on Survue’s website predicts it will produce a final version for Kickstarter campaign backers next spring.

“I want to get the technology out there so people can be comfortable and start riding more and enjoying the benefits – physical, mental, you name it – from biking,” Fox said.

While that’s within reach, Fox has his eyes set on the future, too. He’s beginning to raise capital toward mass manufacturing the device and potentially using the technology in it for other products.

“From a long-term business perspective, we’re looking at other applications that we can use this exact technology in to start lowering risks for workers or other people in different sectors,” he said.

For more information on Survue, go to survue.ai.