Strava Heatmap of Sports Activity

Strava, one of a number of services that walkers, runners and cyclists can use with their smartphones, recording and uploading their routes, has released a heatmap showing the activity uploaded to the network on Saturday 20 July. Zooming into London reveals many tracks. By default it shows cycling uploads, with a toggle for routes on foot.

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There is a sizeable pulse heading NE from Hackney, when viewing the visualisation for the evening hours. This is the Dunwich Dynamo, a 120-mile free sportive, that takes place overnight once a year, where upwards of 1000 cyclists head out of London, towards the Suffolk coast. As such, despite Strava’s claim on the site, it was anything but a typical Saturday. (Note also that the map possibly normalises based on activity, so that when the Dynamo starts at around 8pm, other cycling activity in London is less prominently represented. Or maybe that’s just because it’s starting to get dark…)

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It’s a nice visual, although an aggregated view across several Saturdays, or several weekdays, would provide a more representative graphic of London’s activity hotspots and popular recreational routes.

See also this heatmap of running routes using Nike+ apps which we highlighted earlier this year.

Found via an article on road.cc. Basemap is Google Maps.

3 comments

  1. Hello,

    My name is Axel Szmulewiez, I am an undergraduate senior economics student from Argentina studying at Brandeis University in Boston, MA. I am writing an economics thesis on the health impacts of hosting the Olympic games for the host city population. As part of my analysis, I am looking for ‘exercising data’, something I can measure ‘before and after the event’ to determine if hosting the Olympics impacts in changes of attitudes towards sports, and a great measure of exercising would, of course, be running and biking.

    I have seen you possess an immense database with such information broken down by city (hopefully broken down by county as well), and I was wondering if you would be willing to aid me in my research by providing me some of this data. This is an entirely academic project, it has no commercial gain of any sort (it’s a thesis to graduate with honors). I would of course cite you in my work, maybe it would be good publicity for your organization if my paper gets published!

    Any type of data of the following cities would be deeply appreciated:

    London (Olympics occurred in 2012, so I would need data from a couple of months/years before and after)

    Vancouver (Olympics occurred in 2010, so I would need data from a couple of months/years before and after)

    Sydney (Olympics occurred in 2000, so I would need data from a couple of months/years before and after)

    Atlanta (Olympics occurred in 1996, so I would need data from a couple of months/years before and after)

    Salt Lake City (Olympics occurred in 1992, so I would need data from a couple of months/years before and after)

    Los Angeles (Olympics occurred in 1984, so I would need data from a couple of months/years before and after)

    I eagerly look forward to your response.

    Thank you!

    Axel

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