Structural information deficits about our aging bridges have led to several avoidable catastrophes in recent years. Data-driven methods for bridge vibration monitoring enable frequent, accurate structural assessments; however, the high costs of large-scale deployments of these systems make important condition information a luxury for bridge owners. Smartphone-based monitoring is inexpensive yet has produced structural information, i.e., modal frequencies, in crowdsensing applications. However, current methods cannot extract spatial vibration characteristics, which are needed for damage identification. Here we present the most extensive real-world study on bridge monitoring with crowdsourced smartphone-vehicle trips and simulate damage detection capabilities. Our method analyzes over 500 trips across four bridges with main spans ranging from 30 to 1300 meters in length, representing about one-quarter of US bridges, and extracts absolute value mode shapes, a damage-sensitive feature. We demonstrate a bridge health monitoring platform compatible with ride-sourcing data streams that check conditions daily. The result is the potential to commodify data-driven structural assessments globally.

This data accompanies the study "Crowdsourcing Bridge Dynamic Monitoring with Smartphone Vehicle Trips" published in (Nature) Communications Engineering. This paper focuses on using large and inexpsensive datasets for obtaining information on the dynamics of bridges. In this study, data is collected by smartphones in moving vehicles as the cross over a bridge, in three distinct applications. Smartphone data was collected in controlled field experiments and uncontrolled Uber rides on a long-span suspension bridge in the USA (The Golden Gate Bridge) and an analytical method was developed to accurately recover modal properties. The method was also successfully applied to partially-controlled crowdsourced data collected on a short-span highway bridge in Italy. The results suggest that larve and inexpensive datasets collected by smartphones could play a role in monitoring the health of existing transportation infrastructure. The data provided includes the source data for the figures in the publication as well as the "controlled data" referenced in the study.