In March, we ran a post that featured heatmaps of various cities showing where people run, using individual’s workout data consolidated by Nathan Yau at flowingdata. “We have to do this for Vancouver,” I said.
Well, guess what.
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You can tweak the map for running and cycling data, or both, revealing intensity of routes.
“Pan, zoom, and be gobsmacked using their interactive map. The Strava dataset includes over 77 million rides and 19 million runs, represented by a staggering 220 billion data points.” – Gizmodo.
Interesting skews. The routes which are somewhat rare but remote and race routes attract a disproportionately high number of GPS tracks, so you have some remote and sparsely populated routes like the Hanes Valley and Howe Sound Crest Trail showing up brighter than the well-marked, urban and very heavily used Burnaby Mountain trails. Trails which have races (eg: Baden Powell Trail and the the Knee Knacker) leap out, with so many users timing & tracking themselves for race day and training runs.
It’s nice to see the water front, lakes, mountains and urban trails stand out so strongly. It really highlights how valuable these resources are. I hope in our frenzy to develop new areas, we remember to set aside some space for people to get away from the houses & roads.
This is great data, but heavily skewed towards recreational riders (MAMILs and the like, plus mtb users). San Francisco Country Transportation Authority has a great open source application for getting those utilitarian trips: http://www.sfcta.org/modeling-and-travel-forecasting/cycletracks-iphone-and-android
I agree with Corey. Until utilitarian or commute-to-work riders start collecting data for this, the intensities will skew heavily towards those who do collect such data. And we lovingly refer to them as MAMILS.
Further, such utilitarian riding is the area that has the greatest potential for large increases in ridership.
So using this map for planning is lmisleading.