Digital Transformation in Government Insight #60: Biking apps helping out government

Using data from cycling apps

Biking apps are being used by cities around the world to help planners analyse cyclist’s habits and feed this back into planning decisions, including policy and infrastructure.

This is a great example of data-driven decisions within the public sector.

How it works

According to a GovTech article, transport planning departments are working with private companies (the cycling apps), using the app’s data to replace or supplement traditional methods of gathering data such as physically counting cyclists, surveying them, and even guessing traffic patterns.

Strava Metro is a branch of the cycling and running app, Strava. Strava Metro is working with many different councils, anonymising and aggregating its data for use. In fact, the Strava Metro site says that over 100 transport planning departments around the world are using its data, including Queensland (view Strava Metro’s Queensland case study). According to a Queensland Government article on Strava, there were over 75,000 registered Strava users in Queensland in 2015.

Cities using it

The GovTech article mentions quite a few US cities/areas using data from either Strava or Ride Report. For example, the Seattle Department of Transportation started working with Strava Metro in 2015 and used its volume data to analyse the number of riders and riders per street and per intersection.

Florida has used Strava data to decide which streets to sweep more frequently, sweeping streets with higher cyclist traffic more often.

And in April this year, the Portland Bureau of Transportation partnered with Ride Report (read the City of Oregon announcement) to use the app’s data for cycling project planning and evaluation.

Limitations

Despite the fact this is a great example of using data to make public sector decisions, there are risks associated with relying solely on data from the apps.

For example, Ride Report has analysed its customers and found they tend to be younger and in the higher socioeconomic bracket. This creates a data skew, that needs to be taken into consideration — data from the apps isn’t necessarily representative of all cyclists. In addition, of course not all cyclists will use the app, so market penetration effects the data.

However, councils are working around this by comparing the app’s data to their own data to track any bias — biking apps are one piece of the puzzle to create better cycling strategies.

Salsa Digital’s take

This is a great data-driven approach to building infrastructure and policy for cyclists. Of course, as open source (and open data) aficionados we’d prefer if this data was open(!) but it’s still an excellent example of digital transformation in the public sector. And it’s nice to see Australia using this approach as well as the US.