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news
Strava Metro London UKStrava moves into 'big data' - London & Glasgow already signed up to find out where cyclists ride
Strava has moved into the 'big data' game with the launch of Strava Metro, which it says gives data providing “ground truth” on where people ride bikes or go running – and it is licensing the results to city authorities and advocacy groups, including in London and Glasgow.
The San Francisco, California-based company, developer of the smartphones apps and website that allow users worldwide to track their rides and runs, says that “millions of GPS-tracked activities are uploaded to Strava every week from around the globe.
“In denser metro areas, nearly one-half of these are commutes. These activities create billions of data points that, when aggregated, enable deep analysis and understanding of real-world cycling and pedestrian route preferences.”
The popularity of using Strava on main commuter routes can clearly be seen on the map of London accompanying this article – you can find a bigger version here on the Bicycleretailer.com website – with strong levels of usage on roads such as the Embankment.
Making the data available to local transportation authorities or advocacy groups can help identify where demand for cycling, for example – and thereby the need for safe infrastructure – is strongest.
According to the company, “Strava Metro’s mission is to produce state-of-the-art spatial data products and services to make cycling, running and walking in cities better.
“Using Strava Metro, departments of transportation and city planners, as well as advocacy groups and corporations, can make informed and effective decisions when planning, maintaining, and upgrading cycling and pedestrian corridors.”
Clearly, there are bound to be privacy concerns with such a service – we’ve reported in the past, for example, concerns that thieves use rides uploaded to Strava to target where people who own high-end bikes live.
Strava has sought to allay such worries by emphasising that Strava Metro “processes the data to remove all personal information linked to the user and structures it for compatibility with classic geographical information systems (GIS) environments.”
It adds: “Strava Metro tools enable DOTs and advocacy groups to do detailed analyses and glean insights into cycling and running patterns dissected by time of day, day of week, season and local geography.
“Advocacy organisations and the general public can now access high-resolution heatmap visualisations of the data free of charge at Strava Labs.”
You can find those heatmaps here.
“Organisations seeking deeper insight and analysis can license Strava Metro data and tools for use with geographic information systems (GIS) mapping software. Licensing costs are based on the number of Strava members in the requested geographic area.”
There is an inquiry form for anyone wanting to find out more information.
The company’s co-founder and president Michael Horvath said: "Bicycling safety is a top concern to our members worldwide, especially when they're riding through metropolitan areas with a high concentration of motor vehicle traffic.
"Strava Metro delivers an innovative way for us to serve Strava members and non-members alike by helping to make their daily commutes and weekend rides smoother and safer," he added.
Pricing of the licensing of the data will depend on the number of Strava users in the area concerned.
According to a blog post by Reed Albergotti in The Wall Street Journal, the first local authority to sign up is the department of transportation for Oregon, which will pay $20,000 to license it for 12 months to analyse usage in Portland.
A policy analyst working for that body, Margi Bradway, said: “We’re dipping our toe into the idea of big data with this project.”
Jennifer Dill, who is a professor at Portland State University’s Nohad A. Toulan School of Urban Studies and Planning, said: “Right now, there’s no data. We don’t know where people ride bikes. Just knowing where the cyclists are is a start.”
Other customers are located in London, Glasgow, Orlando in Florida, and Alpine Shire in Victoria, Australia, although the actual bodies to have licensed the data have not been reported.
Simon joined road.cc as news editor in 2009 and is now the site’s community editor, acting as a link between the team producing the content and our readers. A law and languages graduate, published translator and former retail analyst, he has reported on issues as diverse as cycling-related court cases, anti-doping investigations, the latest developments in the bike industry and the sport’s biggest races. Now back in London full-time after 15 years living in Oxford and Cambridge, he loves cycling along the Thames but misses having his former riding buddy, Elodie the miniature schnauzer, in the basket in front of him.
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46 comments
From the moment Strava became so popular the data became their biggest asset. If the councils have people capable of big data analysis it will be useful, retailers and advertisers can, so expect to see some billboards for latest gadget at a strava section near you.
Thanks for clarifying that road.cc...
Great opportunity for the Strava team though. I'm always a little concerned for Strava's future, as I can't imagine their ratio of paying subscribers to free users can be all that high, at least not if my own Strava followers list is anything to go by. Its not like Garmin Connect where they have the luxury of high margin hardware to bring in the profits. Glad to see them identifying other ways to raise revenue.
I think this is a great idea for local communities to benefit from actual usage patterns. Don't forget that the traditional method involves a loop of rubber hose stretched over the road and a datalogger.
There is always bias in any measurement, but there are so many ordinary cyclists using strava anyway and is this not a huge step forward?
Before everyone gets too animated about whether a Strava user is a "real" cyclist ... It's pretty straight-forward for Strava to analyze the data and separate the commuters out from the roadies & others, based on their speed, pattern of acceleration and time of day.
What you're seeing here is the untreated version of that data - if you want the breakdown and more detailed analysis, I'm sure it's available from Strava for a price
Analyzing vast swathes of data is never perfect, but this is a pretty snazzy source of data IMHO, and a really important step towards understanding where we all ride and what might make it easier.
Yes and no. It is possible but not straightforward without making a lot of assumptions. The analysis of such data is not easy even for some of the most sophisticated analytical organisations, let alone the average municipal authority traffic department.
This is the problem with big data of all descriptions - it rarely works on its own. The danger is that people start to rely on it in preference to more detailed and more expensive data of the type which is gained from periodic cycle and other traffic surveys. Big data makes very little sense without small data to benchmark against.
Only sort of- and that's what the paid-for version of the data gets you.
But
Huge "but"
It still only covers Strava users. Which is, not to put too fine a point on it, MAMILS in the main. Even they generally won't use Strava to record every errand to the shops etc. I've already spoken to the head Cycling officer at Cambridgeshire County Council. He'd already come to the conclusion that for him, the data is more or less worthless due to it being an especially small subset of cyclists and a subset of their journies.
In fact, the more cycling there is somewhere, the less useful the data is, as the smaller the % of riders that are Strava users (even as that % probably represents a larger % of the total population).
Having said all that, I've taken (though most of it is being filed as private so as not to annoy friends following me) to recording every little shopping trip. I'm interested in quite how far I really do cycle.
Are you sure about this though?
Perhaps they can filter the data they have, but they can't put back in data that was never there in the first place. Its always going to be a partial and biased sample, as large numbers of cyclists will not be using Strava to begin with (I don't - no disrespect to those who find it useful or just amusing, but I have no interest in it).
Unless you can be sure its entirely random whether someone registers with Strava or not then how can they know what data they are missing?
As someone has said, there's quite a big difference between the average Strava user and the average London (or anywhere else) commuter. It's not as if commuters just continuously get lost in Regent's Park, inadvertently circling it several times before managing to find their way out.
Also, this bit makes me scared... "as well as advocacy groups and corporations"... I don't know WHY it makes me scared. I can't imagine what big corporations could really DO with lots of cycle data. But mixing big corporations with big data has a rather ominous ring to it.
So you don't want new bike shops to pop up on heavily used routes?
So, if you want the routes you cycle to get council or government funding for improvements you'd better join Strava and get logging that data!
I think it is a no brainer why this information could be useful, my only caveat, how representative of ALL cyclists is Strava?
Probably better than nothing but unlikely to capture the non competitive and utility riders who will benefit most from better infrastructure.
Thinking about this a bit more, Strava using commuters are probably commuting further and faster but also using the more direct routes, maybe the knowledge that cyclists want the direct route between a and b and don't want to use the back roads might actually be a good thing? I know many utility cyclists use the back roads, but is this because they want to or because they would rather not mix with the traffic on busy roads?
Actually, quite a lot worse than nothing - it would give an entirely false and misleading impression of cycling as a whole to use data from a small coterie of speed demon vehicular cyclists, and decisions made on such data would almost certainly be bad decisions. I do hope it is not true that any London local authority has bought this crap.
Daft idea. Data set isn't "where cyclists go", it's "where Strava users go". For instance, around Cambridge, the local TT courses are very obvious on the heat map, but often on roads that no sensible riders use... the data fails to show some of the busiest routes to and from schools for example.
I realise that TTs will kindof of be taken care of because the data sets they're selling have time information, so they can get maps of peak hours, but still massively distorted in favour of lycra wearing long distance commuters (like myself).
i fear that councils don't really have the expertise to deal with this data (http://www.theguardian.com/environment/bike-blog/2012/may/25/cycling-gov...), do they provide any assistance with that?
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