Strava presents "Better Data for Better Cities" to MWCOG

In September, Strava - the athletic tracking app - presented its data collection and presentation abilities to the Council of Governments' Bicycle and Pedestrian Subcommittee. They have quite a few local users. 

Some of the uses they identify, grouped as Discovery, Implementation and Prediction are 

• To prove that people ride bikes
• To identify what changes riding behavior
• Locating hot spots, slow down regions, origins and destinations. 
• Generating traffic demand models
• Determine high bike use streets

They say they can separate commute routes from recreational ones and break it out by time as they do with Rock Creek Park.

The potential for this kind of data is enormous, even though we all recognize that it has limitations (not everyone uses it and those who do use it are not representative). It may not be great at telling you what the "average" cyclist does, but it would be pretty good at showing how new infrastructure or how closures impact cyclist and, to a lessor extent, pedestrian behavior. Despite people saying that it's mostly used for recreational rides, they say that in urban environments 40-60% of rides are commutes, and that commute and recreation routes are highly correlated. 

Origin-Destination map for DC

There's just oodles of data in there. Demographic stuff, speed, distance, time spent waiting at intersections, time spent crossing intersections, etc... And they note that when combined with stationary counters and crash report data, the data becomes even more useful. 

Then, though they don't mention it, once they can combine bike share data - both DoBi and CaBi - it really starts to build a bicycling data golden age. 

Comments

[Tom]

Strava has a "commute" flag as well that could be helpful for transportation planners. We can use all the data we can get.

Unfortunately Strava is focused on the athlete recreational demographic and is not a representative demographic slice of the population. They are missing many of those who cycle every day to their jobs in the service industry, etc.

[washcycle]

They strike me as being more aware than anyone of the data's demographic limitations, and with ways to correlate it with other data to compensate for it.

[happy rider]

The limitations are acknowledged. Nevertheless, this is still a very useful database.

[Crickey]

I refuse to give in to The Man! My riding patterns remain known only to me and to my children, who are already sick of me talking about it.

[Smedley Burkhart]

Recovering Stravista here, but I was never sick enough to record, much less post, my commutes. Bet it predicts spatial commuting patterns pretty well. Probably not so good on temporal measures. Cool stuff either way.

[Ampersand]

My company participates in the National Bike Challenge, which meant that during the applicable time period last year I Strava'd all of my commutes (because it was the only way to log miles - I have several opinions about that which are not relevant here). I hate Strava and refuse to use it otherwise. I find the concept of KOM to be almost sociopathic in an urban setting. All that said, the data is nice to have, although I'm not sure the city is interested in doing much besides looking at it.

[washycle]

I only record it as way of keeping track of my miles. I try to hit a certain number every week, and coming up short is a useful tool when trying to explain to my wife why I should be allowed to go on a bike ride on Saturday instead of taking the kids to swim practice.

I do try to break my own personal bests, if only because I recognize how hard that will be with each coming year, but I'm not much of KOM person. I share the one for going SE on the Sousa Bridge because, when commuting to work one day, all the lights lined up and there was a hurricane force tail wind.

I have another for a run I did in Austin where I and one other guy are the only people to have done it. It's some road in a residential neighborhood and I feel like the guy set it up so that he could be KOM and I ruined it, which is all the sadder because of how slow I run (I'm not even sure you can call it "running").

But I feel like most of the KOMs are unobtainable because inevitably someone forgot to turn Strava off when they finished their ride and then drove to their friends house.

[DE]

I also use Strava mostly for logging my yearly mileage goal. But I find I have to be careful and not become competitive with others, because really, what's the point of competing with randoms, some of whom may be on ebikes or whatever. There will always be people faster, so we get uptight for no reason.

That said, I did create a route near my house up a steep grade, then went and got the KOM. It was kinda fun, it's the only one I'll likely ever have at my age, and as is the way of everything, it's temporary.

[DE]

we = why

[ACyclistInThePortCIty]

1. Ebikes are supposed to be entered as ebike rides, and are not counted on the regular leaderboards.
2. I mostly use it to log miles, but also like to see where my friends are riding, how my times compare to my friends, etc.
3. If you have looked at the heat maps, you can see things like changes in response to infrastructure changes. So the data is useful, IMO

[Crickey]

Yes, I don't Strava or even use a cycling computer because it tweaks the competitive impulse, which then makes the ride less fun.

[DE]

Ebikes are supposed to, yes, but come on. I don't know how some of those numbers are done otherwise. At one time the record for Washington Circle eastbound must have been done by throwing a phone/GPS across the circle (it's gone now).

The flybys are cool.

[Sladkovm]

Its a great source of cycling data. I've even played with some of it trying to separate commute-like routes from the workout-like routes in Brussels area.

https://sladkovm.github.io/machine_learning/2017/08/07/Using-Machine-Learning-To-Separate-Workouts-From-Commutes.html

https://delfrrr.github.io/strava-activities/brussels