Not all apps make that big of a difference.
But Strava is slowly become a big deal. More than 100 cities and states are now using it for better understanding and planning how people are moving around.
In a world where long-range planning and engineering is quickly becoming a dinosaur, planning for now can happen with Strava.
Strava Metro–tagline, “commutes count”–is a small branch of the company, which comprises about nine full-time employees compared to Strava’s 140 employees.
Today, Metro works with more than 125 agencies and departments, which pay a subscription-style licensing fee to Strava that is calculated per user (80 cents per user annually, which amounts to about $20,000 for Oregon’s Department of Transportation, for example). That includes major cities like Seattle and entire statewide groups like Florida’s Department of Transportation, but also smaller and rural areas like Rapides Parish in central Louisiana, which used Metro data to get its first comprehensive look at how people in the region bike and walk, resulting in its first bicycle and pedestrian plan.
To understand why Metro has grown so quickly, it helps to know how planners typically collect data about walkers and cyclists. Which is to say manually, using a clicker-style counter while standing on a street corner or at the foot of a bridge. While most transportation departments have a fairly fine-grained understanding of how cars or buses operate on their streets, walkers and cyclists are a very difficult group on which to collect granular, network-scale data.
Strava didn’t set out to fill in those data gaps, but by the nature of its large user growth, it was doing so in an ad hoc way.
While only about half of its activities are commutes as opposed to workouts, Strava is actively courting commuters with campaigns like the Bike to Work Day challenge and campaigns like “commutes count,” which highlights the fact that many of the athletes that use Strava to log their workouts also use it to record their commutes.
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