Strava and Bike Use in the Strafford Region

During the bitter cold of a New Hampshire winter, one thing is on all our minds… Bicycling.

Okay, maybe not everyone is thinking about bicycling when it’s below freezing, but that doesn’t mean no one is out cycling. Just ask the Strava users in the region who went on 1,417 bike rides on days that were below freezing between November 1, 2013 and October 31, 2014. In fact these brave cyclists only took 10 days off all year!

How do we know this? From the Strava data SRPC got access to last year.
The Strava data only makes up a portion of all bicyclists in the region. Strava gets rider data from people who download their app on their smartphone. Then the user has to log their rides in the app and select “Public” when they save the ride. There are approximately 3,000 Strava users in Strafford, Carroll, and Rockingham counties. There are roughly 466,000 people in the three counties, so there’s a very good chance that the actual number of bicyclists is much higher.

SRPC has recently done an in-depth analysis of the Strava data and found that not only do we have a lot of cyclists in the area, but they bike all year long. The only days that they didn’t bike were December 15th, 17th, and 31st (2013), January 21st and 22nd, February 5th, 14th, and 19th, and March 13th and 30th (2014).

So where are these cyclists riding? They seem to really enjoy the southern portion of the region, but they used 73% of all the roads in the region.

We have roughly 340 miles of state recommended bicycle routes in the Strafford region. These routes range from the clearly marked bicycle lanes in Durham, to the 2 foot wide shoulders on NH 202A.