Oakville, Ontario Plans, Builds and Defends its Need for Bike Lanes using Metro
In Oakville, Ontario, transportation planners are using Strava Metro data both to map out the location of new bike lanes and to defend those bike lanes after implementation.
Oakville is a Toronto suburb with nearly 200,000 residents. The city has been using our data to inform the ongoing development of its bike network.
One recent addition to the bike network is on Kingsway Drive, a collector road that links two major arterials. There are two schools on Kingsway Drive, and the city was concerned about excessive speeding on some segments. Strava data also showed significant bike traffic, with volumes doubling between 2016 and 2017.
In the summer of 2017, Oakville decided to stripe curbside bike lanes on Kingsway. “The city put it in as a safety project because there already were people cycling there,” said Frank Goehner, who supervises analytics for the city.
Like many bike projects that change the geometry of a street, the Kingsway Drive bike lanes drew some opposition after implementation. Critics wanted to get rid of the redesign because they thought the bike lanes weren’t getting used. Strava data proved otherwise.
At two City Council hearings on the project in 2018, Oakville active transportation planner Chris Clapham presented Strava data to council members who were skeptical that the Kingsway Drive bike lanes drew significant numbers of bike trips.
Clapham was able to demonstrate significant bike traffic in the project area. And because Strava Metro includes hourly breakdowns of trip volumes and analyzes origin-destination pairs to distinguish bike commute trips from other types of trips, he could also show that this bike traffic wasn’t limited to weekend warriors.
The City Council decided to keep the bike lanes.
Oakville continues to use our data to help plan its bike network and to evaluate projects post-implementation. The city currently ports Strava Metro into ESRI. Next up, Goehner is working on a custom-built application to make our data even more accessible to the city’s planners. With the app, he said, “they can click on a road, then select different time frames for ridership, and see how many people were cycling.”
