Strava has been inviting all manner of cyclists to join in on a worldwide challenge to get more people to ride bikes to work, but also to stand up on their pedals to be counted. They’ve picked next Tuesday out of the internationally recognized May Bike Weeks to claim the title as Global Bike to Work Day.
By sharing their bike commutes, cyclists around the world can have an impact on how cities plan, build, and rebuild their biking infrastructure. Through their Strava Metro program they can share anonymized, aggregates commuter data with those who can use it to see how to better optimize city infrastructure, thus even short commutes can have a greater impact as a whole. Find out more about what Strava is doing, and how to join in…
Strava is asking all cyclists to ride on Tuesday. They aim to make May 10th, 2016 the largest bike to work day yet. Just upload your commute and tag it with the hashtag #CommutesCount on Strava and across other social media channels to voice your global support for better cycling and pedestrian infrastructure.
Strava has been lobbying with the concept of a Global Bike to Work Day for a while now, and has gotten feedback that policy makers around the world would love to be able to tap in to the type of data that Strava regularly collects for its athlete member base, who many times are regular bike commuters as well. So Strava developed this #CommutesCount campaign that will let cyclists’ voices be heard and their numbers be counted.
Every week more than one hundred thousand new members sign up to Strava. Last year alone more than 33 million activities were uploaded to the site. Partnering with urban and transportation planners, Strava is now anonymizing all of that data via their Strava Metro program to give these professionals a better look at how cyclists actually ride in their cities and regions, so they can help tailor infrastructure to actual demand and use patterns. The social collection of ride data has meant that Strava is able to collect much more data than even those policy organizations who get out and count urban cyclist activity in their own cities.
Strava’s VP of marketing Gareth Nettleton is pleased to see that they can use the data collected from their global community of millions of cyclists and runners and use their activity logs to “promote positive changes in their backyards and improve cycling, running, walking, and living in their cities”. Strava Metro is already working with more than 70 organizations and government agencies worldwide to turn this anonymized user ride data into better infrastructure policy from Glasgow to Queensland, with London, Oregon, Vermont, Austin, and more in between. (It is also worth noting that any Strava user can opt out of sharing their data via Strava’s privacy settings, although Strava assures us that the Metro data is sufficiently separated from any user id data.)
For more info on Strava Metro itself, check out is project page at: metro.strava.com.
