How Madison County, IN uses Metro to plan Bike Infrastructure Improvements

When Indiana’s Madison County set out to update its long-range bike plan in 2015, good data on cycling was hard to come by. A region of small towns and farmland anchored by the city of Anderson, the county had no bicycle count program. But it does have hundreds of Strava users, and our data helped planners assess where people bike in Madison County, and where new bike infrastructure should go.

The regional planning agency, the Madison County Council of Governments (MCCOG), aims to make bicycling a safe travel option both for local commuting within towns and for recreational trips spanning different parts of the region. Without stationary bike counters, however, there was no reliable data on where, when, and how many people were biking. So planners turned to Strava Metro data.

“The purpose was to gain additional insight in bicycle usage for our region, pair that with both additional analysis and local cyclist input, and prioritize corridors for bicycle-related improvements,” said Ryan Phelps, a senior transportation planner at MCCOG.

Using Strava Metro, planners were able to map the roads with the highest concentration of total bike trips. The specificity of our data made it especially useful. By comparing existing plans for the bike network with Strava’s detailed maps of bike traffic, staff were able to adjust the routes of bike facilities in response to real world usage, modifying alignments to match high-volume corridors.

Madison County purchases new Strava Metro data every two years, and Phelps expects to use the next batch in similar fashion to develop the bicycle component of the county’s upcoming 2045 Metropolitan Transportation Plan.

While the county currently lacks fixed bike counters, Phelps envisions combining Strava Metro with stationary counters to further refine its bicycle traffic analysis. “Our intent is to eventually use Strava Metro to expand data from a non-motorized count program, including both continuous and short-duration count stations,” he said.

Strava Metro has already served as a stepping stone in this process. Because our data differentiates commute trips from other trips, the county can now see where biking to work is especially prevalent. This has enabled planners to classify routes in the bike network according to a three-tier system — recreational, utilitarian, or “mixed” — which will inform the deployment of fixed bike counters.