City Planners Zero in on Cyclists Through Exercise App (ft.com) 80
With 47m global users Strava has the potential to generate big data for public development [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled]. From a report: When the UK capital built a "cycle superhighway" in 2016, Strava indicated where people had changed their route and showed that the number of cyclists increased by 60 per cent when a bike-only lane was built along the Victoria Embankment on the Thames. Planners can observe changes, such as many cyclists avoiding a direct route, to see where roads may be dangerous. Granular data from Strava also show where cyclists have to stop and wait, information Ms Hall used to review traffic light patterns so more cyclists could get a clear run on their commute. While recognising its potential, however, researchers warned that Strava and other crowdsourced data sets should be treated with caution. Giulio Ferrini, from cycling charity Sustrans, said the average Strava user was probably "not representative" of the average cyclist.
Strava says it has 5.5m users in the UK. But researchers fear they are a self-selecting group, filtered by an affinity for exercise apps that may make them more competitive than others. According to Ms Hall at TfL, they "tend to be more gung-ho." Relying on crowdsourced data, Mr Ferrini said, could lead to cities being designed for "white men in Lycra" who usually travel speedily from A to B and neglecting groups such as parents who cycle with their children to school. Tom Knights, who oversees partnerships at Strava Metro, acknowledged the tool was not "trying to do everything." But he pointed to several academic studies that found similar travel patterns on Strava data and other sources.
Strava says it has 5.5m users in the UK. But researchers fear they are a self-selecting group, filtered by an affinity for exercise apps that may make them more competitive than others. According to Ms Hall at TfL, they "tend to be more gung-ho." Relying on crowdsourced data, Mr Ferrini said, could lead to cities being designed for "white men in Lycra" who usually travel speedily from A to B and neglecting groups such as parents who cycle with their children to school. Tom Knights, who oversees partnerships at Strava Metro, acknowledged the tool was not "trying to do everything." But he pointed to several academic studies that found similar travel patterns on Strava data and other sources.
Cyclists (Score:2, Funny)
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Re: Cyclists (Score:2)
Fuck both sides and then go look at japan.
Well designed roads and pedestrian(bike) paths alongside.
And they manage to bikemute without showing their ass too.
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In Japan, distances between places are shorter and therefore aerodynamics aren't as much of an issue. And drivers there are better educated and more attentive and so bright colors aren't as important for safe bicycling. And bicycling among pedestrians is safer because pedestrians know what to do when they hear a bicycle bell [youtube.com]. In the USA, instead of stepping to the side, pedestrians are more likely to ignore you or step right into your path.
So it's really an apples and oranges comparison, unfortunately.
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In Japan you can also park your bike at the railroad station, beside thousands of others, then take the train to work and have the bike still be there when you get back.
In most parts of the US you will have no bike to return to, and usually no railroad station.
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Re:Cyclists (Score:4, Funny)
If they didn't wear that spandex shorts I bet I wouldn't hate them as much as I do. That shit annoys me sooo much.
Now we all know you're annoyed because you can't stop checking out their asses as you drive by. Homophobia is your problem, not theirs.
Re:Cyclists (Score:4, Funny)
It's not just the spandex, it's the attitude.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CVPkfxDUkAAuZdO.jpg [twimg.com]
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Say its summertime and 80 degrees with high humidity. You bike to the office and are dripping with sweat. What are you supposed to do? Take a whores bath in the bathroom sink or what?
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No my company pays well enough that everyone owns a car.
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Good fucking luck finding somewhere to park in the City. Shit, even the rest of central London.
Hell, I had a job interview in Leeds last week. No parking at any of the six large office buildings in the complex I visited.
Of course, a lot of people like leaving the car at home and cycling to work. Gets them some fresh air, exercise, doesn't add to local air pollution. You should be thanking them.
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I've been unfortunate enough to see this and unfortunately sit in a conference room with them afterwards.
Re:Cyclists and spandex (Score:2)
here is also my Strava account... https://www.strava.com/athlete... [strava.com] You will need a Strava account to view my Strava account. It has been raining all day today so I drove to work this morning(Friday).
If we were al
San Fransisco Fixed This (Score:3, Insightful)
Bike lanes increase traffic because they take away lanes for cars.
Just another 'feel good' piece of legislation at the expense of the people.
Re:San Fransisco Fixed This (Score:5, Insightful)
Bike lanes make little sense in dense urban areas. So many people are making turns, double parking, and pulling in and out of alleys and parking spaces that the bike lanes are useless.
Bike lanes work best when they are physically separated from motorized traffic. You can't do that by just painting lane markings on the street.
Also, planners often assume that cycling is about recreation. It is not. It is about commuting. Bike paths should take people to work, school, and the grocery store, not take them on a winding scenic tour of a park.
There is a simple way to judge if a city's bike policies are working: Look at the gender ratio. Men are more willing to accept risk and will use routes even if they feel they are not so safe. Women are more reluctant to do so. So if few female riders are using a bike path, it may need a redesign.
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No amount of money could make me want to ride on streets with cars.
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100% agree. Converting some roads to bike/foot paths is a far better solution. That also requires building parking on adjacent streets, however, so it winds up being expensive (especially in dense locations like SF, where it would have to be multi-level.)
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Really? My knees are fucked but a few hundred quid will get you a mile or two.
Make it real money and I'll risk needing a kneecap replacement. Maybe I'm cheap.
Oh, you mean you're scared of the cars? Shit, we teach children how to ride safely in traffic. It's not hard.
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Bike lanes make little sense in dense urban areas. So many people are making turns, double parking, and pulling in and out of alleys and parking spaces that the bike lanes are useless.
My impression is the opposite - that car driving makes little sense in dense urban areas. (based on a sample size of "Seattle downtown"). I go there mostly by bus, sometimes by car, rarely by bike. The bike rides are always the fastest. Driving is the most frustrating.
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Bike lanes increase traffic because they take away lanes for cars.
You need a breakdown lane anyway, so why not stripe it as a bike lane?
San Francisco got rid of its bike lanes because it needed camping strips for the homeless.
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They got rid of their bike lanes.
Wrong. [smartcitiesworld.net]
immobile (Score:3)
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After reading your comment, all I could think about was this [youtu.be].
If (Score:2)
If all the "gung-ho" "white men in Lycra" are "avoiding a direct route" because its dangerous then you can be pretty certain the other cyclists are too.
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Don't worry about not having a good way to school (Score:1)
There's no safe road that hasn't seen a cyclist.
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Further:
They apply laws broadly so what might make sense in an urban becomes a point of friction in rural areas.
They don't take vocation into account. Many contractors, inspectors, and sales people, for example, drive a lot of miles by themselves in a car because that is what the job requires. Adding a park in parking lot, wait for bus, walk 15 minutes each way, etc., adds considerably to typically pressured schedules.
They assume handicaps somehow only apply to severe cases, such as using a walker, crutches
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So how do you explain the obsession with bike lanes where I live in Minnesota? Our city is obsessed with taking away traffic lanes for this purpose despite the fact that there's a lot of snow and ice and temperatures well below freezing.
It's neither practical nor safe for all but a subset of the population willing to invest heavily in a winterized bicycling setup and healthy/strong enough to do it in subfreezing weather.
I'm willing to buy into segregated bicycling infrastructure for climates where it's abo
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And yet people do cycle in the snow in most of the Scandinavian countries. The "winterized bicycling setup" consists mostly of a normal bike. Some people stick a studded tyre on (cost about 30$ or 1.5x to 2x more than a normal tyre) often just the front. Many people do not. Here are some nice pictures:
http://www.aviewfromthecyclepa... [aviewfromt...lepath.com]
I cycle to work across a moor-land cycle path (in the middle of the city, don't ask!) with no gutters, so it can get very icy. It's actually easier to cycle with studs than it
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Furthermore, why must everybody "track" their exercise? For bragging rights? I bicycle, walk, work out at the gym, etc. without having any need to "track" it. I know how much time I spend and how hard I work out by looking at my watch and noting if I'm breathing hard or sweating. I exercise because it feels good while I do it, and makes me feel good afterwards. Tracking, electronics, apps, social media sharing, all not required.
Re:Priority to cyclist is insane (Score:4, Insightful)
Furthermore, why must everybody "track" their exercise? For bragging rights? I bicycle, walk, work out at the gym, etc. without having any need to "track" it. I know how much time I spend and how hard I work out by looking at my watch and noting if I'm breathing hard or sweating. I exercise because it feels good while I do it, and makes me feel good afterwards. Tracking, electronics, apps, social media sharing, all not required.
People like to track their rides and workouts so they can measure progress. Seeing improvements in how much you can lift or how fast you ride is motivation to keep at it and keep improving.
"Furthermore", what kind of nerd are you that you would question why people want to collect data?
Re:Priority to cyclist is insane (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't go anywhere near those extremes, but it does feel good if you know that you've beaten some previous record of yours regardless of what it is. Maybe some people just like doing it on a micro level for fitness goals.
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Full disclosure -- I actually do keep a hand-written tally of the times I ride my exercise bike at home.
Originally, I thought I could eventually make it into a database, extract statistics, etc. But I never did. And now I realize that there's some kind of satisfaction in just picking up a pencil and making a notation. I've rarely looked back at my past history, and seem to have less and less interest in doing so.
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I'm a competitive swimmer and I was a competitive cyclist. The numbers are useful to me. What gets measured gets managed, right?
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It's only a "niche mode of transportation" because of areas with people sharing your attitude. Take a look outside your bubble, and you'll see that it's really quite commonplace, and people WANT to ride, but existing infrastructure isn't bike-friendly.
Where do you live where "[o]nly small percentage of population can bike"? What cities are mostly old, young, disabled and sick people? I think you've got it entirely backwards.
Also, studies over and over and over and over and over and over and over show that t
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Even in China, where biking is common and culturally established and where there are dedicated lan
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The two things are not exclusive. Public transport is fine, but it does not always go where you want and is not much good for short distances. The solution is to have a system of public transport, high quality bike paths and integration between the two. The Dutch have achieved it and have a lot of experience in how to design this sort of road system. Much can be copied from them.
What you end up with is a city that is safer, less noisy, less polluted, full of life, and a good place to live. It works, has bee
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Bikes can carry 200 times more people on a road lane than a car actually does.
Get over yourself, you are the traffic, not us.
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Here is my ride home from work yesterday afternoon(Thursday Dec 12)... https://connect.garmin.com/mod... [garmin.com] 18 miles... It was 49F and raining.
Cycling is not a past time or just a hobby.
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Do you mean an individual car? I should have thought that was obviously not true. Do you mean that, in our current road systems, build for cars, aggressively unpleasant toward people on foot or bike, that not many people use bikes or walk? Yes, well, that is true.
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This is central London. The density of people means that if everybody drove to work they'd need roads stacked 28 lanes high and there'd still be congestion. They'd need to build 4000 new car parks on land that costs a million pounds per square metre.
They already had buses. They already have light rail. They already have underground rail. They already have a vast taxi network. They already have plentiful major railway stations with hundreds of trains a day arriving from across the country.
People might want t
Easier to just install bike counters (Score:3, Informative)
Here in Seattle, we have bike counters on our bridges, and you can see the 60 percent increase in bike traffic, as we move away from dinosaur car use to a city that walks, bikes, scoots, skateboards, and takes transit every day.
Now if only our property taxes weren't subsidizing all those suburban cars that park in front of our houses to avoid paying for parking.
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Also, Strava already has a feature where the user, when saving a ride, can flag it as being a commute, though for most commuters, the fact that the bike is being used to commute can likely be inferred:
I would be honestly surprised if you couldn't machine-learn which of my rides are commutes, versus which are recreational. They just aren't the same kind of riding.
Also, I quite enjoy the implication that because I do long/challenging recreational rides, that means my commuting is insanity. People get all in a tizzy about lycra-clad riders blowing stop signs ... try living near a school sometime. I see "serious" riders doing things like rolling stop signs all the time, but for the TRULY stupid things, li
LOLwut!? (Score:3)
Strava is used almost exclusively by road cyclists in Lycra on $10k CF wonders - that's about as far from a commuter cyclist as you can get short of riding MTBs down Whistler. Using this data source because it's there and easy is laziness that will lead to the creation of useless IRL-Peloton lanes.
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Strava is used almost exclusively by road cyclists in Lycra on $10k CF wonders
I know lots of commuter cyclists who use Strava regularly. They like to compare their daily rides.
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strava also has a beacon function that is handy for regular hobby cyclist.
when something happens, people can check where you are.
there are also different subscription models, which cater to different types of cyclists (depending on the subscription you use you get different features).
Data selection problems (Score:2)
Setting aside the usual devolution of stories like this into cyclist vs car hit pieces there's some very interesting discussion here on data selection bias.
Governments have little information to go on so they either go through a costly measurement exercise or they can crowd source data. However this is no different to what happens on computer software development giving this story a nice tech angle. Companies like Microsoft and Google often advertise that their design decisions based on data that have gathe
I would bike more if it was safe. (Score:2)
I think you have to be almost as big a moron to bicycle on city streets as you do to ride a motorcyle. People are absolute idiots, no matter how good or safe you think you are some moron will out-stupid you and hit you and it's goodbye legs (or life).
I was behind some dolt at a left turn lane and she suddenly just started backing up and she hit me. There was no damage she was going very slow but how the fuck do you put your car in reverse and then just back up at a left turn? There is literally nothing you
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scary urban riding contexts like London
What the fuck? London is very safe already for cyclists. The traffic can't go fast enough to do any damage in the first place.
There are in recent years 10 or fewer deaths a year of cyclists in London, despite 720,000 cycle journeys every day. Now remove the deaths where the cyclist was a stupid fuckwit cutting down the inside of a large vehicle turning left and the death rate is a rounding error.
It might be scary but only if you're inexperienced or stupid.
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Do City Planners Ride Bikes? (Score:1)
It's a slippery road (Score:2)
I once ran four red lights in a row before they actually caught me on the fifth.
That was one of the very few days in the year when they actually care.
I've since cut back on the red-light-running, but more for reasons of personal safety and because I don't want to gun down a pedestrian trying to cross the street...
I do use Strava and I do wear lycra. The former because I like to try my progress (or lack of) and the later because it's the most comfortable (I shower at work).
IDGF what some people think about i
Cycling advocates (Score:2)
This is the biggest problem when you are searching for the best demographic to represent cyclists. On cycling Internet boards, the "lycra set" will shout down the commuters, calling them "Freds" (which is supposed to be some sort of insult). So what you get is a consensus tailored to sports and fitness users. Not the people who want to replace cars with bicycles. The other group of 'advocates' are the anti-car people. Who don't give a damn about cycling per se. But see bicycles as living speedbumps that can
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Indeed, this is a problem. Currently in many city, cyclists represent a hard-core. And that is unfortunate, and also presents a trap. People in cars would behave better and more considerately toward people on bikes if they cycled themselves.
All of this requires political leadership or strong campaigning. In the case of the Dutch it was primarily the latter and now quiet, calm and pleasant cities.
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Or maybe people commuting on bikes would come to despise the hard core riders as much as car drivers do. This is the case in The Netherlands (I've cycled there many times). The lycra gang who think they are training for the next Tour de France are as unwelcome on bicycle paths as they are on roads.
Percentages vs. Scale (Score:2)
When the UK capital built a "cycle superhighway" in 2016, Strava indicated where people had changed their route and showed that the number of cyclists increased by 60 per cent when a bike-only lane was built along the Victoria Embankment on the Thames
Similar statistics in Los Angeles, where they've been taking away road lanes on the most congested streets to make dedicated bicycle lanes. The City likes to tout statistics about huge percentage upticks in bicycle ridership, but the absolute numbers are more difficult to come by. Why? Because it would piss people off even more than they already are to find out that the two-mile backup of standstill traffic on congested streets is called a "success" for increasing bicycle traffic by 300% - from 2 bicycles a
You can smell the BS when... (Score:2)
they say, "Granular data from Strava also show where cyclists have to stop and wait..." We all know cyclists do not stop and wait for anything, let alone a stop sign or red light.
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Yeah, growing up in Germany with cycle lanes all over the place and a right of way for pedestrians you learn to stop for cars and people on foot. It's quite weird seeing cyclists in the UK that think everybody else should get out of their way.