While transportation departments have become experts at measuring car traffic, most agencies don’t have a good grip on bike traffic. Strava Metro can change that.
Colorado DOT is utilizing Strava Metro to classify state roads with high levels of bike traffic. That information is helping the agency prioritize maintenance resources for bikeways, and it serves as a point of reference for planners and designers working on the agency’s bike plan.
Just as short-duration counts supplement permanent counters when measuring vehicle traffic, CDOT sees Strava Metro as a tool to supplement its fixed-location bike counters.
“We realized we don’t have resources to do short duration bike/ped counts all over the state like we do with traffic,” says CDOT engineer Ken Brubaker. Enter Strava Metro. Strava’s geographically robust dataset supplies fine-grained information about bike travel patterns, bypassing the need for thousands of short-duration bike counts.
To assess whether Strava Metro is representative of overall bike travel, CDOT compared our data to the output from bike counters at 16 locations. Separate regression analyses were performed for year-round, peak season, weekday, and weekend data. “The linear correlations between the counter data and Strava counts were high for all assessed time periods,” CDOT reported.
CDOT has used our data to identify and map road segments across the state with high levels of bike traffic, helping the agency design bike facilities in accordance with usage.
“Before the [Strava] dataset there was only this word-of-mouth way to know whether cyclists were using corridors,” says Brubaker. “There are lots of corridors that lots of cyclists are using that don’t have that word-of-mouth reputation, and that’s where Strava helps.”
CDOT has made Strava Metro data available as a resource to the agency’s bike planners & designers, and it’s influencing policy. “We know that 5,000 people are using this road,” said Brubaker, “so we’ll direct maintenance resources to it.
