EPISODE 349: Turn on Strava for everyday journeys, it could reshape streets for the better

17th March 2024

The Spokesmen Cycling Podcast

EPISODE 349: Turn on Strava for everyday journeys, it could reshape streets for the better

SPONSOR: Tern Bicycles

HOST: Carlton Reid

GUEST: Tom Knights, Strava Metro

LINKS:

https://www.the-spokesmen.com/

https://www.ternbicycles.com

https://twitter.com/CarltonReid

https://press.strava.com/articles/stravas-metro-reaches-significant-milestone-of-10-year-anniversary

https://metro.strava.com

Carlton Reid 0:13

Welcome to Episode 349 of the Spokesmen cycling podcast. This show was engineered on Sunday 17th of March 2024.

David Bernstein 0:28

The Spokesmen cycling roundtable podcast is brought to you by Tern bicycles. The good people at Tern are committed to building bikes that are useful enough to ride every day and dependable enough to carry the people you love. In other words, they make the kind of bikes that they want to ride. Tern has e-bikes for every type of rider. Whether you're commuting, taking your kids to school or even carrying another adult, visit www.ternbicycles.com. That's t e r n bicycles.com to learn more.

Carlton Reid 1:03

I'm Carlton Reid. On today's show, I'm talking with Tom Knights. He's the senior manager of partnerships and marketing for Strava Metro. This is a super-useful active travel city-making dataset-service from the athlete tracking app. And if you bristled at the word athlete, because you think there's no sport in transport, listen on ...

Strava metro was very, very

insistent in 2020. About how successful cycling and and walking in all active mode because of the pandemic and the blog posting was, you know, we're very pained to say this. However, you know, it's really, really, we're going crackers with the amount of cycling as you know, the bike boom, yeah, what did go amazing. Now, the bike industry right now is famously and woefully massively down in the dumps. So what have you seen with usage? So what has happened since 2022? actual usage of bicycles not just, you know, we know the sales are bad. Is the usage bad also?

Tom Knights 2:21

Yeah, that's a really good question. And actually like to say the kind of the free, the free, free call to Strava Metro kind of suddenly going free was actually very well timed, unfortunately, under very difficult circumstances globally. One of the reasons like I say, we kind of made Strava Metro free wasn't actually because of the pandemic and the looming kind of crisis. And obviously, this switch to human powered transportation. It was like, almost like an unfortunate timing, but but obviously beneficial for cities and all the planners that start to use this data. So yes, we definitely saw this huge boom during the kind of 2020 21 era. And thankfully, because a lot of cities and a lot of regions and governments had the foresight to start investing in protecting cycle lanes in safe routes, which we know is one of the biggest barriers to people actually kind of picking up a bicycle. Lot of those initiatives have stayed, and we hope that they've stayed because actually, they've been able to see some of the Strava activity straight through Strava Metro, and then use that against other data sources to start to understand actually, is this being used in terms of trends, and overall, we've definitely seen more of a normalisation but again, what we are seeing is obviously, people looking for alternatives to either commute, and then well, kind of 2024 the word commute looks a bit different than maybe it did in 2019. But anything that's a utility trip, and essentially through safe and accessible infrastructure. That's what we know. And I'm sure you know, from all the kind of conversations you've had over the years, that's the biggest driver to people, making it feel safe. So, long story short, yes, we've definitely seen a normalisation now, in terms of growth

Carlton Reid 4:06

Normalisation, that sounds like quite a bit of a euphemism for, for what?

Tom Knights 4:12

So I guess the new the new normal as it were, so we've definitely seen that growth. And then now what we've seen, like I say, as people who are consistently cycling now, and then obviously, we hope that through infrastructure improvements into society into communities, that will then also encourage even more folks to pick up a bicycle on that front.

Carlton Reid 4:33

I'm gonna carry on digging here, because I think it's quite important. So that graph that was on the Strava Metro, I remember it well, the human powered transportation one Yep. Yeah. So I mean, that was that was great. But, you know, so when you've been normalisation, is that graph, it went up like crazy. And do you mean by normalisation that it went down so well usage is down or has

plateaued,

Tom Knights 5:00

so not I mean, it's difficult to say but I w...