Your cart

Fitness Tracker Becomes City Planning Tool

Three years ago Strava, a popular fitness-tracking app and social network for athletes, embarked on a journey to change commuting by bike and foot. With over five million rides and runs uploaded each week, the GPS cycling and running app collects trillions of data points that show how people actually move through cities. In 2013, Departments of Transportation (DOT) approached Strava about that data and in 2014, Strava Metro was launched.

Get The Latest Sports Tech News In Your Inbox!

Inspired by Strava’s heatmaps, the DOT contacts, who are Strava athletes, saw opportunity to use that data collected to improve cycling and pedestrian infrastructure. The heatmaps anonymously visualize the GPS points of every ride or run recorded on Strava and can be viewed on Strava Labs.

The heatmaps give real information on how people were getting from point A to point B and these Strava athletes realized that data could be very useful for city planning.

So Strava spun off part of the business to create Strava Metro, which aggregates the data behind that visualization, providing deep insights into the way people are getting around. Strava Metro sells the anonymized datasets to departments of transportation and city planning organizations with geographic information system (GIS) professionals, who have the expertise to sparse the datasets.

‘The data provides real ground truth to how people move in their community,’ said Andrew Vontz, Cycling Brand Manager at Strava. ‘And Strava Metro transforms how cities are collecting data on the commuters.’

Unlike traditional bike counters, Strava Metro gives a more complete picture of the data across a city including where rides begin and end, what direction people are going, and even how the time of day or time of year effects which routes are taken. Vontz told me that the data collected in San Francisco showed that more than 43% of the weekday rides recorded were considered commutes, meaning they were more than 1 kilometer long and started in one place and ended in a different place.

Having the data to discern which rides are commutes – as opposed to training rides – gives cities real information on which routes are the most popular. Even rides through cities to get to the training rides show how cyclists move through that city and help determine the preferred routes. Vontz explained that based on correlation studies, Strava users provide a good representation of the general biking population. So the rich data from Strava Metro gives cities and departments of transportation deep insights to make decisions about where to invest in cycling and pedestrian infrastructure. 

The power of the data has been proven to create a better place to cycle. Two cities that partnered with Strava Metro built an elevated bike path or pedestrian bridge based on the data. Not only did bikers and pedestrians change their preferred route shortly after the infrastructure was built, but the new routes provided a safer alternative than the routes previously being taken. For now, Strava Metro requires GIS specialists to analyze and interpret that data, but down the road, they hope to develop a graphic interface that allows more people to understand the data – which in turn will let Strava Metro provide better support to cities and advocacy groups.

While all rides are included in the Strava Metro data, Strava introduced a ‘commute’ tag to help filter the commute rides. Commuter data is also determined from an automated process that locates point-to-point trips that are within duration and distance constraints as well as fuzzy name matching from the activity titles. So regardless of whether you tag your ride or run as a commute, the data is still used to help cities build better infrastructure.

To support this initiative, Strava Metro is hosting the first Global Bike to Work Day on Tuesday, May 10th. Make a difference in your city by recording your ride from Point A to Point B on Strava on Global Bike to Work Day, and every day. The more data Strava Metro has, the richer the datasets will be to help cities optimize the best routes.

← Back to SportTechie