Strava: Don’t be such a roadie
Tucson’s bike month may be over, but it is just beginning for the rest of the country.
Strava is getting in on the action by encouraging bicycle commuters to start logging their commutes during bike month and specifically Global Bike to Work Day on May 10.
In a recent blog post the ride-tracking giant said their “Metro” group analyzes millions of commutes a week and works with municipalities to offer insights into the habits of bike commuters.
Here’s how they explain it:
More than five million rides and runs are uploaded to Strava each week, and in cities, the majority of these activities are commutes. These activities have created trillions of data points on where people actually ride, run and walk in cities.
In 2014, Strava launched a data service called Strava Metro. Since then, Metro has worked with over 70 organizations around the world to understand how more than a half-million bicyclists and pedestrians choose to navigate through cities. Each of these organizations is using the anonymized data to understand the general flow of people across their streets over time.
Tucson’s Bicycle and Pedestrian Planner Ann Chanecka said the City of Tucson hasn’t partnered with Strava because for planning it has “limitations.”
“I appreciate them trying to capture transportation trips but my concern is that the data is limited to a self-selecting group,” Chanecka said. There are a lot of folks who use a bike out of necessity that I don’t expect will download the Strava app and use it to record their trips.”
Chanecka said the city aims to be as inclusive as possible when thinking of planning bike facilities.
If you are curious where people are tracking their rides in Tucson currently, check out the Strava Heatmap.
As for me, I stopped logging my bike commutes because it became too much work to constantly remember to charge my GPS and I didn’t need any help killing my phone’s battery. What about you? Do you track your bike commutes via GPS? Leave a comment.
