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Video: Why Open Data Matters for Cycling: Visualizing a Cycling City

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Re: Video: Why Open Data Matters for Cycling: Visualizing a Cycling City

#11

Post by KennyBlanken »

Melatonic wrote: post #9

Very cool! I need to use this more for Los Angeles. The city is known to be one of the worst cycling cities in the US (and many parts are quite awful). But given that it is such a huge behemoth of sprawl there are also some quite amazing bike paths and places to cycle if you know where to go. And the LACBC is doing amazing work on getting that expanded - one day somewhat soon there should be a bike path running the e…

LA is surprisingly progressive; it's (still, I believe) the only city in the US to outlaw harassment of a cyclist, though as always, good luck getting the police to do anything for you if you're on a bike.

LA has a lot going for it in terms of biking for transport. Easy to navigate road system, the sprawl means bikes are an attractive alternative to walking, ditto for having pretty flat terrain.

Re: Video: Why Open Data Matters for Cycling: Visualizing a Cycling City

#12

Post by dspillett »

CalRobert wrote: post #3

This is really cool! Though a writeup would be nice instead of a 50 minute video. OpenCycleMap is really a gem - it's why I bought the house I did (among other reasons). Thunderforest puts together some nice bike layers in their map tiles too. Related, there's some free courses on how to do Urban Mobility Visualizations (those cool 3d renders architects and urban planners make) at urbanmobilitycourses.eu, well worth…

> Though a writeup would be nice instead of a 50 minute video.

It looks like it is a recording of something that was intended as a live seminar¹ so a conscious decision was made to make and present it this way. Though transcript would be useful, that could take time to produce². If you have an abundance of time, perhaps you could volunteer?

[1] one that might have been in a hall somewhere but was pushed into homes by C19 restrictions, going by the backgrounds

[2] the speakers may not have had full scripts, just crib notes, meaning a transcript would be more work than simply collecting their notes together, and I've not seen great results from automatic transcription except when the speaker has a very clear “standard” accent and the sound quality is high.

Re: Video: Why Open Data Matters for Cycling: Visualizing a Cycling City

#13

Post by Lio »

JNRowe wrote: post #8
loeg wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strava global heatmap is pretty good if you trust other cyclists' judgment: https://www.strava.com/heatmap .

To further your point about trust a little: Strava-using cyclists are a very specific group of cyclists IME. Back when I used it my commute had tens of segments with 40km/hr medallists, and a sprint segment with weekly new records in excess of 50km/hr. And, you can even catch snipers rolling on to and off a road near me to protect effort for a two kilometre junction-free sprint most weekends.

That is true but you also see people putting there dog walks on there. Or their commute to work or to the shops.

These days it's all a bit moot as you get people on ebikes and scooters "cheating" by recording their rides as road rides (either deliberately or more often by accident).

Re: Video: Why Open Data Matters for Cycling: Visualizing a Cycling City

#14

Post by Lio »

0des wrote: post #7
loeg wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strava global heatmap is pretty good if you trust other cyclists' judgment: https://www.strava.com/heatmap .

The lingering issue I have with that is that at first glance you see some cool routes, but then you get there and realize it was clearly a route for mountainbikers. I commute via track bike, which couldn't be any more ill-suited for the terrain. Given that my bike and style of riding is more suited for flat smooth pavement, I generally just ride with traffic as the routes are better maintained and it is easier to kno…

That's odd as Strava routes has an option to control the terrain it uses for a route. You should be able to just choose smooth tarmac only.

I guess that could be limited by how good the mapping data is where you live but it works really well where I am.

Re: Video: Why Open Data Matters for Cycling: Visualizing a Cycling City

#15

Post by kiliantics »

I am in the process of planning a trip and wanted to visit a city that was bicycle friendly. I figured there must be some index or metric that I could use to compare cities. There are such numbers to compare things like air quality, traffic, cost of living, etc. But I couldn't find any kind of standard for bikeability or walkability. The only related measurements made are for how long an average trip takes for cars.

Without a good measurement, we won't have something to point at to force cities to be better. And making these changes is an urgent must right now for the climate of course and just for the average standard of living, which seems to be going down everywhere due to the sizes and quantities of cars that are arriving in cities lately.

I really support this kind of work and hope it grows. Here is another nice project I found using OSM during my search:

https://pasaentuciudad.com.mx/ranking-cyclability-in-europe-...

Re: Video: Why Open Data Matters for Cycling: Visualizing a Cycling City

#16

Post by JNRowe »

Lio wrote: post #13
JNRowe wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To further your point about trust a little: Strava-using cyclists are a very specific group of cyclists IME. Back when I used it my commute had tens of segments with 40km/hr medallists, and a sprint segment with weekly new records in excess of 50km/hr. And, you can even catch snipers rolling on to and off a road near me to protect effort for a two kilometre junction-free sprint most weekends.

That is true but you also see people putting there dog walks on there. Or their commute to work or to the shops. These days it's all a bit moot as you get people on ebikes and scooters "cheating" by recording their rides as road rides (either deliberately or more often by accident).

I'd be interested in reading about the changes as Strava expanded. I imagine they see a lot more casual recreational use as the viral growth moved beyond the club riders/runners, but I'd also expect you see performance increase as they captured more top performers too. Did the performance distribution grow evenly? Do people shift their routes towards segments with accessible leaderboards? …

On cheating: I used to moan about Strava accepting car and train journey speeds when it felt obvious how to detect some of them, but I can't even begin to imagine how to automate detection in the era of e-bikes. People must spend a lot more time flagging rides to maintain their magic internet points trophy now ;)

Re: Video: Why Open Data Matters for Cycling: Visualizing a Cycling City

#17

Post by cmdalbem »

kiliantics wrote: post #15

I am in the process of planning a trip and wanted to visit a city that was bicycle friendly. I figured there must be some index or metric that I could use to compare cities. There are such numbers to compare things like air quality, traffic, cost of living, etc. But I couldn't find any kind of standard for bikeability or walkability. The only related measurements made are for how long an average trip takes for cars.…

Your point is super important, but fortunately there is actually a lot of research and debate on this topic. The most common misconception is that it's enough to talk about the absolute total length of cyclable paths, but I simple to understand that's not the best metric to compare cities.

I'm the designer and developer of CicloMapa [1], one of the tools presented in the video. The project is a partnership with ITDP, which is an international organization that created and constantly measures a metric called People Near Bike (PNB) [2]. In summary takes into account if the infrastructure is really serving people that live nearby.

Another metric we use, at least for some brazilian cities, is IDECICLO [3], which analyses the quality of the existing infrastructure in terms of access, comfort, safety etc. It's a very holistic metrics, but compared to PnB is way more complex to measure and more prone to subjectivity.

[1] https://ciclomapa.org.br/ [2]https://itdpbrasil.org/pnb/ [3] https://plataformadedados.netlify.app/ideciclo/

Re: Video: Why Open Data Matters for Cycling: Visualizing a Cycling City

#18

Post by snthd »

kiliantics wrote: post #15

I am in the process of planning a trip and wanted to visit a city that was bicycle friendly. I figured there must be some index or metric that I could use to compare cities. There are such numbers to compare things like air quality, traffic, cost of living, etc. But I couldn't find any kind of standard for bikeability or walkability. The only related measurements made are for how long an average trip takes for cars.…

Look at "modal share".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_share

https://cityclock.org/blogs/cycling-mode-share-data-700-citi...

Re: Video: Why Open Data Matters for Cycling: Visualizing a Cycling City

#19

Post by c0nsumer »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #10
loeg wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strava global heatmap is pretty good if you trust other cyclists' judgment: https://www.strava.com/heatmap .

Strava heatmap is terrible. It is heavily biased toward experienced (and often very fit/quick) recreational/sport/fitness cyclists. I'm a very experienced cyclist and I don't upload my 'transportation' rides. It's not worth it. So all the data from me riding a particular route twice, five times a week - as well as my preferred routes to various activities, shopping, etc - doesn't make it into strava. My fun / trainin…

As a mapper (into OSM), the Strava Heatmap is one of the most valuable things ever for mapping off-road trails. I've found nothing more accurate for actual trail locations than the heatmap. The only thing that comes close is multiple passes with a high quality hand held GPS receiver, taken when the leaves are down.

Re: Video: Why Open Data Matters for Cycling: Visualizing a Cycling City

#20

Post by snthd »

julvo wrote: post #2

Tangential, but I wish there was open traffic data with high coverage for planning low-traffic cycling routes. Looked at openly available aerial images, but the resolution is not high enough to detect traffic

RDS-TMC transmits traffic data over FM radio. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_message_channel Some is encrypted, some not.

It might be possible to model traffic with OSMnx to assign weights to roads by expected traffic levels https://github.com/gboeing/osmnx

Depending on where you live you might be able to get traffic data and maybe traffic models from public authorities using Freedom of Information requests. eg London's TFL:

https://datatonic.com/case-studies/traffic-prediction-tfl/

>Designed to gather data from all over London, TFL’s Urban Traffic Control (UTC) system collects car activity records via 14,000 individual road sensors located throughout the city. We were given 3-months worth of these records to create our traffic prediction model — totalling over 120 billion data points.

Once you have road weights you can use something like brouter - https://brouter.de - it can already do road types and elevation.

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