Strava Global Heatmaps
Sat 4th Nov, 2017 @ 9:30 am
Do you even Strava? The social network for athletes, has unveiled its Global Heatmap, an interactive data visualisation featuring more than 1 billion activities from Strava athletes across the globe. The map boasts six times more data than the original version in 2015, and incorporates a wide variety of year-round land and water activities. Created in conjunction with Strava Metro, Strava’s heatmap is a data visualisation tool that provides a broad look at activities, popular routes and sport destinations around the world.
The Strava community has generated more than two-hundred thousand years’ worth of activity that cover nearly 17 billion miles. Visit the new Strava Global Heatmap here and see activities from any location on the planet. Learn more about Strava Metro here.
The Strava Global Heatmap is the biggest and richest publicly available dataset of its kind and consists of:
- Over 1 billion activities from over 10 million athletes
- 3 trillion latitude/longitude points
- 10 terabytes of raw input data
- A total distance of 27 billion km (17 billion miles)
- A total duration of 200 thousand years
- 12 trillion pixels rasterized
- 5% of all land on Earth covered
“A global community can seem very abstract until you see its activities visually represented in your immediate location and across the world,” says Strava CEO James Quarles. “It’s not just runners and cyclists, either – skiers, hikers, kiteboarders and even mountaineers on Everest are all counted in the more than 1 billion uploads of the Strava community.”
The heatmap features data from 31 different activity types, spanning everything from kayaking to backcountry skiing. Strava Premium athletes can also access personal heatmaps, a unique way to visualise their activities over time. It shows everything from swims across the English channel to hikes on iconic trails in Patagonia to snowboarding in Japan. It’s also a tool that Strava athletes explore to find new places to play.
This window into the world of human movement is taken a step further with Strava Metro, a tool that helps make riding, running and walking in cities better. Strava Metro anonymises and aggregates data from the millions of activities shared on Strava each week, and then partners from departments of transportation and city planning groups use to improve infrastructure for cyclists and pedestrians. A full set of Metro data enables deep analysis of activities such as popular or avoided routes, peak commute times, intersection wait times, and origin/destination zones.
“The Strava Heatmap is enlightening because it lets us connect the bike riders we spot on the streets with a broader perspective of our territory, over space and time,” says Jorge G. Coelho, Mobility Project Manager, AMAL, Portugal. “Strava Metro then gives us the possibility to dive much deeper, breaking down data minute-by-minute and segment-by-segment for the entire road network. It’s a bit like our Pasteis de Belém: they’re good to smell, but you have to really sink your teeth into them to fully take advantage.”
Download Strava for iOS or Android and upgrade to Strava Premium to access advanced features. To learn more about Strava, visit http://www.strava.com.
