Strava Metro Commute

Today STRAVA announced a new challenge, this time it’s the METRO COMMUTE challenge and you can earn what I consider to be a very nice-looking badge.

All you have to do is commute 2 days a week for 4 weeks during the period 28 Oct to 21 Nov. There may or may not be a 5-minute minimum commute distance required so, other than that, it’s pretty simple to understand what you need to do.

Well, not quite as simple as it could be as you have to FLAG your commutes as ‘commutes’ but that’s not hard to do although it could be even easier if STRAVA knew your HOME and WORK locations. [STRAVA does allow you to create multiple privacy zones, which mostly will be centred on either your WORK or HOME. AFAIK it doesn’t allow you to specifically set a home and work location/. If it did it would be able to differentiate COMMUTES from other kinds of rides which, I imagine, would add some richness to their rather massive cycling data set. – although see below http://commutemarker.com]

So what are STRAVA going to do with your commute data? Well, if you’ve flagged it as PRIVATE then they likely won’t do anything with it but the vast majority of you will ‘donate’ public data and this will feed into the STRAVA METRO project. And this project shares data with some key organisations that, hopefully, are all working towards making our cycling lives safer and easier…

• Town Planners – Can look at flows and route choices and understand demographics.
• Transportation Advocates – Can look at effects of priority routes and past projects.
• Tourism Agencies – Could look at seasonalities
• Engineers – Can get data to validate traffic models and better understand behaviours at junctions

So, I guess we sometimes like to knock STRAVA for not giving us too many recent features in return for our Summit membership fees but perhaps they’ll help better design a junction/intersection or two and stop some of us from getting injured. I’d like both of course 😉

Project Info

Techy Link:  Data Details provided from STRAVA Metro