San Luis Obispo uses Metro Data with Bike Counters to Support its Ambitious Bike Commuting Plan
San Luis Obispo boasts one of the most ambitious bike policies of any small city in America. To reach its lofty goals, the city needs robust bicycle traffic analytics to guide its infrastructure investments. Thanks to Strava Metro, planners are now equipped with a travel demand model that’s exceptionally well-attuned to bicycling trips.
More than 10 percent of San Luis Obispo commuters already get to work on a bike. In 2014, the city set a target to increase that rate to 20 percent by 2035 and allocate 20 percent of local transportation funds to bike infrastructure. The accelerated investment in bicycling is a key element of the city’s multi-modal transportation plan, which aims to cut the share of solo car trips in half.
To guide the development and implementation of the plan, San Luis Obispo hired Cambridge Systematics, a transportation consultancy firm based in Medford, MA, to create a predictive model for motor vehicle, transit, and bike travel on collector streets and arterials. Cambridge Systematics used Strava Metro data in combination with stationary bike counts supplied by the city to construct a model that estimates the impact of street design and infrastructure changes on bike travel.
Strava Metro “provided the ability to fill in some gaps in the count data,” said Cambridge Systematics analyst Sean McAtee, while the stationary counts helped calibrate extrapolations from our data to align with empirically observed bicycle volumes.
Because our data supplied a more thorough picture of bicycle trip patterns than stationary counts alone, Cambridge Systematics could predict impacts on bike travel with a higher degree of certainty “than typical models,” said McAtee.
After making a bold commitment to increase cycling and spend accordingly, San Luis Obispo has a lot riding on its investments in bicycle infrastructure. With our data, the city can have greater confidence that those investments will pay off.
