Racing amateurs against Tour de France cyclists

It takes strength and dedication to race in the Tour de France. It’s just that when you see the leading cyclist alone on a steep climb, they kind of look the same as some random person riding up a hill. For NYT’s The Upshot, K.K. Rebecca Lai and Ben Blatt provide a point of comparison.

Data from Strava was used to show how a caterpillar-like group of amateurs rode against a professional. As you might have guessed, the professional climbs much faster. Just a tad.

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Cycling and mapping all the streets in London

Davis Vilums set a goal to cycle every street in London on his way to work (without being late). After four years, he accomplished his goal:

I am a passionate cyclist, and I love the streets of London. Most of my travels are daily 25-minute rides to work. Over time my route became boring. I decided to make it a little bit more interesting by taking the parallel streets on my way there. I bought a map of central London and started to colour in the streets to mark the routes that I have taken. And then I got obsessed with it.

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When cycling is faster than driving

Deliveroo is a service that picks up and delivers food. Data from their delivery riders showed that it was faster to ride a bike than other modes of transportation in cities. Carlton Reid for Forbes:

Smartphone data from riders and drivers schlepping meals for restaurant-to-home courier service Deliveroo shows that bicycles are faster than cars. In towns and cities, bicyclists are also often faster than motorized two-wheelers. Deliveroo works with 30,000 riders and drivers in 13 countries.

That bicyclists are faster in cities will come as no surprise to bicycle advocates who have staged so-called “commuter races” for many years. However, these races – organized to highlight the swiftness of urban cycling – are usually staged in locations and at hours skewed towards bicycle riders. The Deliveroo stats are significant because they have been extracted from millions of actual journeys.

I used to play this game in graduate school often. The bus would get stuck in traffic. I would get off and walk home instead in the most thrilling races the world has ever seen. So for cities, these results make a lot of sense. Maybe not so much for the burbs though.

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Calculating wind drag in the cycling peloton

When cyclists ride in that big pack during a race — the peloton — the ones that aren’t leading get to ride with a reduced wind resistance. Researchers found out the magnitude of the reduction.

Joshua Robinson for The Wall Street Journal:

According to a new study published in the Journal of Wind Engineering and Industrial Aerodynamics, riders in the belly of a peloton are exposed to 95% less drag than they would experience riding alone. Which explains the sensation all riders describe of being sucked along by the bunch while barely having to pedal.

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Ascent in the Tour de France

Tour de France wideview

I was flipping through the channels the other night and happened on the Tour de France. It's cycling, in case you're unfamiliar, and it's not the most interesting sport to watch. But when you get a sense of what these athletes are actually doing — how fast they ride, how high they climb — it's a whole lot more impressive.

The Guardian put together a wide view of one of the major climbs, up Alpe d'Huez, to help you see. My legs are tired just thinking about it.

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Strava Metro aims to help cities improve biking routes

Strava Metro MelbourneLast month, Strava, which allows users to track their bike rides and runs, launched an interactive map that shows where people move worldwide. That seems to be a lead-in to their larger project Strava Metro. Here's the pitch:

Strava Metro is a data service providing "ground truth" on where people ride and run. Millions of GPS-tracked activities are uploaded to Strava every week from around the globe. In denser metro areas, nearly one-half of these are commutes. These activities create billions of data points that, when aggregated, enable deep analysis and understanding of real-world cycling and pedestrian route preferences.

Strava had a handful of clients before the official launch, such as the Oregon Department of Transportation. From Bike Portland:

Last fall, the agency paid $20,000 for one-year license of a dataset that includes the activities of about 17,700 riders and 400,000 individual bicycle trips totaling 5 million BMT (bicycle miles traveled) logged on Strava in 2013. The Strava bike "traces" are mapped to OpenStreetMap.

This is what I was getting at with those running maps, so it's great to see that Strava was already on it.

It'll be interesting to see where this goes, not just business-wise, but with data sharing, privacy, and how users react to their (anonymized) data being sold.