Strava has announced that Strava Metro, ‘the largest active travel dataset on the planet’, is now available and free of charge for urban planners, city governments and safe infrastructure advocates.
As a leading platform for athletes and ‘the world’s biggest sports community with over 68 million athletes’ anonymised data from user activities feeds into Strava Metro. Previously, this was made available for a fee to municipalities, etc., to help with urban planning.
As cities around the world are grappling with the effects of COVID-19 on active transportation, Strava Metro now provides cities with free access to mobility insights. This can help to enable smarter urban planning and infrastructure decisions.
“We always believed there were special ways in which the Strava community could contribute to the world at-large,” said Mark Gainey, co-founder of Strava.
“Strava Metro was one such way. And given the growing need for bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure, we felt Strava Metro was too valuable and important not to make available to any organization attempting to make a difference in designing the cities of the future.”
With 62% of American employees working from home during the pandemic and a related public concern towards taking public transportation, daily travel methods and destinations have shifted on a mass scale.
Millions of people upload their bike rides, runs and walks to Strava every week via their smartphone or GPS device. Strava Metro aggregates and de-identifies this data before making it available to help departments of transportation and city planning groups understand changing commute patterns, improve safety and evaluate infrastructure projects.
For example, Strava Metro analyzed New York City’s changing mobility patterns from July 2019 and July 2020 and found a monumental rise in active transportation.
There were 81% more people who completed at least one bike trip, and 80% more bike trips overall.
Earlier this year, New York City announced the opening of 100 miles of streets to cyclists and pedestrians as part of its Open Streets initiative, to allow for greater social distancing during the COVID-19 crisis.
Strava Metro looked at the related sections of Crescent Street and 34th Avenue and found the initiative to be successful: seeing a 38% and 181% increase in bike trips respectively within this same timeframe.
“Advocates are always looking to data to help determine which streets have the greatest need for safe cycling infrastructure,” said Transportation Alternatives Executive Director, Danny Harris. “Strava Metro is another important tool in helping to understand patterns of cycling and how to provide critical and safe bike infrastructure to more New Yorkers.”
Since Strava Metro’s inception in 2014, partners have paid an annual fee for access to the aggregated, de-identified datasets. Last year, Strava released Metroview, an updated, intuitive map-based web interface providing partners with easier access to insights.
‘Now, by making Strava Metro free to organizations that share its mission to make cities better for cyclists and pedestrians, Strava hopes to power smarter and more sustainable design of the world’s cities and to give back to the communities that support millions of athletes around the world.’
