Identifying Core Route Choice Using Temporal Data — Bike Commuting in Washington, DC
This story originally appeared in the Strava Metro Online Community.
As some of you may know, I started riding a road bike back in 2013. At the suggestion of my boyfriend, Rob, I bought a used bike from the local bike shop here in Lebanon, NH. Shortly thereafter, I moved back to Washington, DC where I had previously gone to undergrad. During the next 2.5 years, I would become the avid bike commuter that I am today.
It didn’t take me very long to realize that the fastest way to travel the 3 miles from my apartment to my office was by bike. When I first began that commute, around September of 2013, there were only a few bike lanes to use. In fact, I would begin in the bike lane on 4th St. SW heading towards downtown, but that bike lane would quickly disappear, leaving me dodging buses, cars, and even the occasional dumpster in the road. But by the end of those 2.5 years, I could make it from SW to downtown completely in bike lanes. The city was making a conscious effort to connect the bike lanes as much as possible, working to prevent those disappearing bike lane situations I had run into two years earlier.
Similarly, the city closes the streets in the northern portion of Rock Creek Park (Beach Drive) on the weekends so that cyclists and pedestrians can enjoy the park without fear of interacting with cars and other vehicles. When we created the sample data for Washington, DC, I knew I wanted to see the impact of the Rock Creek Park closures on cycling patterns. Sure enough, there is a big difference in the number of cycling activities that happen on that road on weekdays vs. weekends, even in the 1 week sample. Check out the images below:
By using the weekday rollup and the weekend rollup in the Strava Metro data, it becomes incredibly clear how providing safe access to streets and roads encourages greater use of the infrastructure. Do you have examples like the one above in your region? Or are there places you wish you could improve? Share your maps in the discussion!
