you can tell where all the local bike shops are and which are the bike friendly cafe’s. It also highlights some of the most used routes.

I think this is what people are saying.

Bike shops and bike freindly cafe’s aren’t that high on most people’s destinations when riding a bike but Strava shows them as ‘important’.

‘some’ of the most used routes means that there’s a lot of well used routes that don’t appear as significant.

So, Strava users give a skewed view of where provision should be made. Which is all anyone’s said who’s questioned the value of the data as a way of planning infrastructure.

It’s not wrong data, just incomplete and unrepresentative.

skewed view possibly of where the best provisions already are.

bike shops and cafes (and other POI) may stand out to us on a heatmap, because we know that’s where the bike shops and cafes are. whether it triggers TFL and LAs to fit more bike parking etc. in the vicinity is another matter.

Page 1 with the list of grand generalisations about who uses strava and how they ride mostly.

Isn’t it fairly obvious that “typical Strava users” are not recording a one mile round trip to the shops for some milk or the pootle to school with the kids? In fact several Strava users have said as much on this thread. So those kinds of journeys are under-represented in the data.

Put another way: if you took a sample of 100 cyclists taking part in a sportive then you’d see a reasonably high percentage of them were using Strava (or some other GPS logger).

If you took the same size sample of cyclists say riding to work at a factory or bimbling through a park with their family then you’d see a much lower percentage of Strava use.

None of this means the Strava users are doing it wrong or should not be provided for. It just means the data has some fairly big limitations to it and is open to misinterpretation by bodies that choose to ignore this.

This has been an amazing and insightful chain of comments and we really do value all of the feedback. If you are interested in hearing more about what we are doing and we our riders really represent you can visit http://metro.strava.com/faq/

On a personal note please know that we do take privacy very seriously and the way that Strava Metro is built does just that. This is not raw data that is being provided back to planning groups but years of well thought out data structure.

Cheers