Washington, D.C.
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From Nathan Yau in flowingdata:
There are many exercise apps that allow you to keep track of your running, riding, and other activities. Record speed, time, elevation, and location from your phone, and millions of people do this, me included ….
What about all together? Not only is it fun to see, but it can be useful to the data collectors to plan future workouts or even city planners who make sure citizens have proper bike lanes and running paths. … there’s definitely accessible data. I use RunKeeper for cycling.
You can even play ‘Guess the City’ with the many other maps listed:
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We have to do this for Vancouver. Though I can guess where the heaviest lines will be. Where possible, next to blue: waterfront trails. Where not, next to green: parks.
There is a tool for creating aggregate heat maps using the Strava API. Unfortunately, this tool is for cycling rather than running, but I’m not really a runner so there you go. Perhaps a runner is aware of something for running specifically?
This tool *could* be useful for planners interested in improving cycling infra for fitness-oriented cycling activity though…
http://www.jonathanokeeffe.com/strava/multi-ride-mapper/
Better site: http://raceshape.com/heatmap/
One creative local mapmaker compiled all his running routes by GPS over the course of a year: http://blogs.ubc.ca/maps/files/2013/03/RouteHistory2012.jpg
Methods and commentary in his blog: http://healthycitymaps.blogspot.ca/2013/11/running-routes-and-yoga-studios.html
City planners always have had trouble tracking travel by the two more ‘informal’ modes, walking and cycling, and therefore undercounting the demand for their models. Their every-5-year origin-destination surveys depend on each respondent’s memory, which naturally lets many of these trips get missed; and annual intersection surveys miss walking trips that are too short to involve any crosswalks at corners where the surveys are taken (many walking trips don’t require a street to be crossed).
Now that self-driving cars are on the horizon, and they seem to be a threat to ‘vulnerable’ road users their veh2veh ‘eyes’ can’t detect, we have a reason to get walkers and cyclists to ‘gear’ themselves up.
I just watched last night [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhWCFi3JIcU] a cyclist with a helmet cam being pulled over by a traffic officer here in Ottawa. The officer told him he was “obstructing traffic.” The rider explained that he was ‘taking the lane’ and avoiding the plenteous potholes along the shoulder-less road in an industrial park. The cam shows not only the cyclist pointing out to the officer how he was doing what the rules of the road require, but also that he kept up with the heavy truck he was following (during the 6-min duration), and if the officer (following the cyclist) couldn’t go as fast as he wanted, it was the truck driver, not the cyclist who prevented that. Nice to have this record-keeping.
Here are the heatmaps of Vancouver’s most popular running and cycling routes using Strava data: http://canadianveggie.wordpress.com/2013/10/26/stravas-crowdsourced-bike-and-running-routes/
And here’s a great followup to the flowindata maps that talks about the biases in the data: http://untappedcities.com/2014/02/20/beautiful-maps-and-the-lies-they-tell-an-op-ed-from-runkeeper/