Gadgetory

Portland's biking infrastructure is widely emulated with 300 miles of bike lanes the city is carefully laid-out for cyclists but the lack of bike data stands in the way of perfection so the Oregon Department of Transportation recently collaborated in Strava a popular biking app an attempt to make the city better and safer for cyclists going through many meetings through the Oregon Department of Transportation and sitting at meetings we were having conversations of well what is the level of service for bicycles and what is the level of service for pedestrians we really just don't have any good data for that it's very hard to plan for a multi-modal agency when you lack bike data so with that problem mining going the meetings I was joining a ride with friends and I realized that everyone was pulling out their cell phones before right and using an app and there's a couple different apps there but in particular an app that's popular in Portland is called Strava straw this a software company based in San Francisco and we develop mobile apps and a website for cyclists runners endurance athletes to track their workouts have a social experience get motivated and hopefully helps make people enjoy cycling and running more it's all sudden I thought to myself well where is that data going all these people are recording their rides why can't we use that data from two points of view we recognized it was a need here there was an opportunity to work together with Oregon you tried to build that Ostrava data set for this purpose it's really interesting to use Strava data but I think that I would push ODOT to try to actually look at who's biking and where the demand for bicycling is rather than where the existing people who are kind of tapped into the system already are I mean I think ODOT has a lot of resources at its disposal but it also if like the people who work at ODOT are not necessarily going to be attuned to the needs of people who live along southeast Paulo say or who crosses need to cross it every day or who would ride a bike except that south street is impossible it's like a wall bicycles are increasingly visible in Portland since 2001 overall bike traffic is up 211 percent in recent years over three hundred miles of bike lanes have been laid out across the city to encourage cyclists Hawthorne Bridge one of the many bike friendly bridges in the city supports an average of 1.7 million bike trips a year with buying this data we are unable to control sample by us there's a certain amount of users that use Java they may not be a complete subset of the population so knowing that we had to cut to kind of work out those issues internally and both with my peers and colleagues to say we recognize that this sample size may not be perfect but don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good this is a lot of good data I think there's a bike movement happening around the country and even around the world it takes on a bunch of different forms but it's there is a rising tide right now for bicycle transportation to become a real normal part of daily life in a lot of communities and one thing that I've been seeing happen is that Portland is a model of that and I wish that we would do it better because I see other people copying this model and achieving the same benefits as we have but also making the same mistakes as we have and one of the mistakes that we've made in Portland is we've really left out large parts of the population unfortunately that's often correlated to a class in Greece so let's take that debate like let's hear the both sides of that debate right now so the the people who who are on the side of straw vote data is not representative are guessing that we have mostly elite cyclists who tend to go out for pleasure rides or go out for training rides not commuters inside straw but that's a myth first of all so when we look at the data in Metro regions about 50% of the activities that are uploaded to Strava are communes so Java is being used by commuters there's another argument because we charge for our service it's not it's not affordable by people with less economic means and not again isn't if our service is free you can upgrade to premium if you if you choose to but it's not required to participate in struggle you can be on free as long as you like I think that big data is really something that public agencies need to embrace and it's an it's new to all of us because again we can't control the data set but big data or app data is the future there's so many people using apps there's so many people using phones so we have to continue to be innovative and think outside of the box and reach out to all of these app companies and start forming these partnerships we both can benefit from learning from each other and sure the data if we figure out the right partnerships and the right agreements to move forward and build better cities and better places to travel