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Tuesday, December 16, 2025

Strava Metro Data as an Urban Planning Input: Seizing Opportunities and Managing Limitations

Over the past year, I've had two publications come out that investigate how municipal planners can use data from the fitness tracking application Strava within active transportation planning contexts. This has been a really fun project to work on, and one where I've gotten to hear directly from planners about how novel data sources can impact their work. I'm grateful to my colleague Dr. Pamela Robinson, from the School of Urban and Regional Planning at Toronto Metropolitan University for our collaboration on this project, as well as key efforts from students Madison Vernooy and Leorah Klein. Two publications have resulted from this work:

Robinson, P. J., Johnson, P. A., Vernooy, M., & Klein, L. (2025). Strava Metro Data as an Urban Planning Input: Seizing Opportunities and Managing Limitations. International Journal of E-Planning Research (IJEPR), 14(1), 1-14.

and

Robinson, P., Johnson, P., & Vernooy, M. (2024). Strava Metro Data: How can urban planning leverage crowdsourced fitness activity data?. Canadian Planning and Policy, 2024(1), 90-108.

Both articles are available from the links as open-access, so check them out! Though there are still issues with applying Strava data in some contexts, I was impressed with the generally cautious approach that municipal planners were taking to adopting this data, and the findings point to some unique application areas for this data source. More to come!