City planners tap into wealth of cycling data from Strava tracking app

Seventy-six cities and regions are using Strava Metro data to help assess and shape transport policy

Sheila Lyons recalls the way Oregon used to collect data on how many people rode bikes. "It was very haphazard, two-hour counts done once a year," said the woman in charge of cycling policy for the state government. "Volunteers, sitting on the street corner because they wanted better bike facilities. Pathetic, really."

But in 2013 a colleague had an idea. She recorded her own bike rides using an app called Strava, and thought: why not ask the company to share its data? And so was born Strava Metro, both an inadvertent tech business spinoff and a similarly accidental urban planning tool, one that is now quietly helping to reshape streets in more than 70 places around the world and counting.