Where in Missouri do people ride?

Where in Missouri do people bicycle?  It would be very, very interesting if we knew the answer to that question in detail.

The 'heatmaps' at raceshape.com don't complete answer that question--but they do certainly give some tantalizing clues.

Take a look at the heatmap for Missouri--colors show where cyclists ride, and different colors show where they ride more often:

Now, you have to take this all with a giant grain of salt, because the heatmap captures only about 190,000 bicycle rides worldwide--whereas we know there at least 25 million bicycle rides annually, just in Missouri alone.  So the above is a relatively small sampling of a relatively few riders.  Blank areas on the map don't indicate 'no bicycling happens here' but simply 'no bicycling by anyone who happened to have the particular unit the raceshape.com site uses and who uploaded data to the site, happened here.'

Still, in the areas with more users, patterns start to look far more interesting and revealing--and give us a taste of what kind of data planners may have to work with as this type of technology because more widely adopted.  Just for example, take a look at the detail in the St. Louis area:

On raceshape.com you can view the worldwide heatmap and zoom into any city or area of interest to see similar heatmaps of cyclist's routes.

[Thanks to Mike W. for the tip.]