Mapping bicycling exposure and safety risk using Strava Metro
Date
2021
Authors
Ferster, Colin
Nelson, Trisalyn
Laberee, Karen
Winters, Meghan
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Applied Geography
Abstract
Overcoming concerns about bicycling safety is critical to increasing the health benefits of bicycling for transportation. While exposure measures are critical for monitoring and understanding bike safety, lack of spatially and temporally detailed bike counts makes it challenging to conduct robust bicycling safety studies. Crowdsourced data from smartphone apps like Strava provide counts for nearly all individual road and trail sections with 1-min temporal resolution. Researchers have found that patterns of Strava bicyclists are similar to all bicyclists in our study area. In this paper, we develop and test a method to normalize bike safety incident hotspots using exposure estimated from Strava data for Ottawa, Canada. We mapped incident hotspots normalized by exposure at increasingly detailed temporal scales. In a dataset with more than more than 8 million Strava activities and 395 incidents (approximately 20,000 Strava activities per incident), adjusting for exposure moved incident hotspots away from protected bike lanes and multi-use paths and onto commercial streets with no bike infrastructure. Strava data are available to correct for exposure where other measures are not available. We encourage researchers, planners, and public health practitioners to consider crowdsourced data to fill exposure data gaps and provide context for interpreting incident data.
Description
Keywords
Temporal scale, Active transportation, KDE, Hotspots
Citation
Ferster, C., Nelson, T., Laberee, K., & Winters, M. (2021). Mapping bicycling exposure and safety risk using Strava Metro. Applied Geography, 127, 1-7. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apgeog.2021.102388.