Edinburgh Bike Data
The data described below is collected via automatic counters in Edinburgh, operated by the City of Edinburgh Council (CEC) cycle team. The bulk of these counters are installed on off-road cycle paths. The devices themselves are relatively unobtrusive green boxes on poles, like the one illustrated below.
By contrast, the "Danish style" counter shown below is operated by Sustrans rather than City of Edinburgh Council, and the raw data is not readily available. However, it could in principle be scraped from the website of the Danish operator ITS Teknik, such as this page for the Sustrans counter on Middle Meadow Walk.
The two University of Edinburgh MSc projects listed below have explored the CEC bike counter data in some detail.
Andreea Pascu MSc Project (2016): Detecting Trends in Bike Count Data in Edinburgh
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GitHub repo for code and data: https://github.com/andreeaPascu/BikeCountsInEdinburgh
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Data (CSV) from Pascu's work published on CEC Open Data Portal: Bike Counter data set
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SQLite Database (183 Mb) of underlying data
Ferdinand Andre Ginting Munthe MSc Project (2017): Exploring Edinburgh Bike Count Data through Data Visualisation
- Thesis — contact me
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System demo — NB The home page is meant to display a news feed, but this is currently not working. To view maps and graphs, go to the Cycle tab and look at one of the sub-menu items such as http://playground.eca.ed.ac.uk/~s1563697/bikecount/map_summary.php. You need to set the date range to between 2016 and mid-2017. [To-do: figure out the exact start and end dates]
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Sample data set from CEC, Jan-Feb 2017
The data that we received weekly is in a compressed file. Inside the file, there are 34 spreadsheets generated from 34 counters. Sometimes we get weekly data that only has 31 or 33 files, probably caused by errors at specific counters. Each file contains the weekly data of a counter. All the files are in .xls format with multiple sheets. The first two are the count data of channel 1 and channel 2. The third one is the weekly summary, which contains the average from the two previous sheets. The last one contains graphs that represent the data.
- Project code — contact me
The Urban Big Data Centre in Glasgow hosts anonymised Strava Metro data for Scotland, though you have to request a licence to use the data.
Daniel Patterson 2017, University of Glasgow, MSc in Urban Studies (2017) Using Crowdsourced Data to Understand the Demand for Cycling on Streets With Varying Levels of Bikeability
This study used a mixed effect linear regression model with crowdsourced Strava Metro data to understand how built and natural environment factors impacted cycling in the City of Edinburgh, Scotland. Bikeability was quantified for each road link and included into the model as a predictor. An interaction term was included to understand how air temperature impacts the demand for cycling on streets with varying levels of bikeability. Results suggest that both weather and bikeability play a significant role in the demand for cycling.
- Thesis — contact me
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Visualisation of commuting to work by bike in Edinburgh by Oliver O'Brien
The Central Edinburgh Passenger and Transport Studies (CEPATS) data was collected by the CEC, and is a manual count of all vehicles, including bicycles, that enter and exit a notional 'cordon' around the city on a particular day, for the years 2010–2013. The data is in Excel format.
Spokes carries out a manual count of traffic on Lothian Road and Forrest Road every May and November since 2006.
- Example query by which pulls back all cyclepaths and cycle routes from OpenStreetMap: http://overpass-turbo.eu/s/fd6
- Website (takes 15 seconds to load) which ranks the cycle paths across Scotland and compares them against Amsterdam (using OpenStreetMap + census data): https://opendata.shinyapps.io/shinyapp/
- Code for website: https://github.com/fozy81/bikr
See http://edinburghlivinglab.org/projects/active-travel-in-inverleith/ for projects carried out in 2014, especially
- Brains on Bikes
- Rate Your Cycle Routes
- WayOkay