City planners tap into wealth of cycling data from Strava tracking app | Life and style | The Guardian

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For city planners like Lyons, used to very occasional single-street bike counts, this is a near-unimaginable wealth of data. While individual details are anonymised, it still shows how many Strava-using cyclists, plus their age and gender, ride down any street at any time of the day, and the entire route they take.

The company says it initially had no idea how useful the information could be, and only began visualising data on heatmaps as a fun project for its engineers. “We’re not city planners,” said Michael Horvath, one of two former Harvard University rowers and relatively veteran 40-something tech entrepreneurs who co-founded Strava in 2009.

“One of the things that we learned early on is that these people just don’t have very much data to begin with. Not only is ours a novel dataset, in many cases it’s the only dataset that speaks to the behaviour of cyclists and pedestrians in that city or region.”

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City planners tap into wealth of cycling data from Strava tracking app | Life and style | The Guardian