Cycling GPS Insights

Client Brief

Birmingham City Council have access to GPS data through the Big Birmingham Bike scheme and wanted to know how they could use this data to learn more about cycling patterns within the city. Birmingham City Council were developing a Local Cycling and Walking Infrastructure Plan and wanted greater visibility of which routes people were actually taking to inform their network improvement strategy.

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City Science Response

Covering the whole of the Birmingham City area, City Science converted 2 years of anonymised GPS bicycle tracking data, comprising of 465,624 distinct observations into meaningful insight.

The team mapped the most popular cycling routes, analysed seasonal patterns of demand and created origin-destination matrices that could then be used in larger transport models.

Outputs

Birmingham City Council was provided with a series of visualisations and processed data that highlighted the patterns of cycling within the city.

"The visualisations and datasets City Science produced allowed us to unlock significant additional value from the Big Birmingham Bike scheme. Some of the results were surprising and made us question our assumptions about where people cycle in our city. Analysis & accurate, up to date data like this is critical to making decisions about future infrastructure."
- Andrew Radford, Principle Infrastructure Delivery Officer