Global Bike to Work Day sees tens of thousands upload their commutes to Strava

mwhittle91 wrote:

A considerable cost, I was quoted £30k for two years of cycling data for West Yorkshire. That was with a 50% education discount. 

The problme they won't give any of it away for free, therefore you don't know how useful it is for your area. The other problme is due to the growth in cycling and the data being a snapshot in time therefire it is out of date within a few months. 

 

Its a great idea, however the idea of selling back data that people have given to them for free is questionable. 

I view it slightly differently - I get a free service from them that I 'pay for' with my data.  How well they then price/market that data is up to them and I hope they manage to get this right to both help with town planning and get to a sustainable business model.

I know some councils have created their own apps to enable people to provide data - problem is that as a standalone app there's not enough reason to use it.  If they could get people to feed this data from more exercise orientated sites then they might have a way of cutting Strava and co out of the picture.

whars1 wrote:

mwhittle91 wrote:

A considerable cost, I was quoted £30k for two years of cycling data for West Yorkshire. That was with a 50% education discount. 

The problme they won't give any of it away for free, therefore you don't know how useful it is for your area. The other problme is due to the growth in cycling and the data being a snapshot in time therefire it is out of date within a few months. 

 

Its a great idea, however the idea of selling back data that people have given to them for free is questionable. 

 

I view it slightly differently - I get a free service from them that I 'pay for' with my data.  How well they then price/market that data is up to them and I hope they manage to get this right to both help with town planning and get to a sustainable business model.

I know some councils have created their own apps to enable people to provide data - problem is that as a standalone app there's not enough reason to use it.  If they could get people to feed this data from more exercise orientated sites then they might have a way of cutting Strava and co out of the picture.

Intresting, I can see where you are coming on the paying/data side. However I don't think they have the right pay system. In the age of austerity a town council could be villified for spending a 5 figure sum on data in that in theory could be collected on the cheap via people with clip boards (obviously the 24/7 nature of the strava data is much better but you can't please everyone!). There's also the aspect that they don't know what the data will look like before they recieve it, therefore it's a bit of a drop in the ocean. 

As a researcher I have a bias, but I bleieve they need to make the data more accesible to researchers. This will put the data and any findings through a proper peer reviwed process, therefore allowing it to be credible data, rhobust methodologies can be created and example findings can be published. By making the data credible in this way town councils are much more likely to see the benefit of the data and be more willing to pay the large sum. 

mwhittle91 wrote:

A considerable cost, I was quoted £30k for two years of cycling data for West Yorkshire. That was with a 50% education discount. 

The problme they won't give any of it away for free, therefore you don't know how useful it is for your area. The other problme is due to the growth in cycling and the data being a snapshot in time therefire it is out of date within a few months. 

 

Its a great idea, however the idea of selling back data that people have given to them for free is questionable. 

but the datasets are huge, the Guardian article on Strava Metro quotes it takes two weeks just to download the full data for London alone, and Cycle Bath who have have done some analysis on how useful the data is https://cyclebath.org.uk/2016/03/25/is-there-value-in-the-bath-strava-data/ were working with 1.3Terabytes of data, just for Bath.

and for Strava to have the capability and capacity to store that amount of data, which is growing day on day, costs a lot of money & its not like they generate revenue through ad clicks from  it, so of course if people or organisations then want to licence it, to "big data" some of it, it should cost them to access it. its not an issue IMO the data was provided free, because Strava provide the means with which to collate the data all together which is where the value is generated, my commute data is completely meaningless in isolation, its only when it sits alongside 1000s of other data points it becomes useful.

councils also regularly spend more than 5 figure sums on traffic surveys,long gone are the days of retired council employees sitting at junctions with clipboards, or even boring old pressure strips on roads,the last one I saw was using ANPR technology  which of course completely ignored the cyclists, and could only snapshot parts of the whole road network at a time because of the limited number of cameras,and yet from that type of  patchwork analysis millions get committed and spent on roads for cars and redesigning roads for cars, 30k seems a bargain in comparison.

brooksby wrote:

I just rode to work as usual, but I didn't put it on strava. Does that mean that that journey didn't happen?   

It didn't, and the same for millions of others like you. 

themartincox wrote:

"providing city planners and campaigners with more accurate information about the way people get about "

at a cost to the planners I presume?

Well, duh.

It'll be a tiny cost in comparison to the difference the data makes for cyclists.