Using strava tweets to analyse cycling patterns
A recent report by traffic research institute SWOV analyses accidents reported by cyclists on racing bikes in the Netherlands. Among other things, the data show an early summer dip in accidents: 53 in May, 38 in June and 51 in August. A bit of googling revealed this is a common phenomenon, although the dip appears to occur earlier than elsewhere (cf this analysis of cycling accidents in Montréal).
Below, I discuss a number of possible explanations for the pattern.
Statistical noise
Given the relatively small number of reported crashes in the SWOV study, the pattern could be due to random variation. Also, respondents were asked in 2014 about crashes they had had in 2013, so memory effects may have had an influence on the reported month in which accidents took place. On the other hand, the fact that similar patterns have been found elsewhere suggests it may well be a real phenomenon.
Holidays
An OECD report says the summer accident dip is specific for countries with «a high level of daily utilitarian cycling» such as Belgium, Denmark and the Netherlands. The report argues the drop is «most likely linked to a lower number of work-cycling trips due to annual holidays».
If you look at the data presented by the OECD, this explanation seems plausible. However, holidays can’t really explain the data reported by SWOV. Summer holidays started between 29 June and 20 July (there’s regional variation), so the dip should have occured in August instead of June.
Further, you’d expect a drop in bicycle commuting during the summer, but surely not in riding racing bikes? I guess the best way to find out would be to analyse Strava data, but unfortunately Strava isn’t as forthcoming with its data as one might wish (in terms of open data, it would rank somewhere between Twitter and Facebook).
A possible way around this is to count tweets of people boasting their Strava achievements. Of course, there are several limitations to this approach (I discuss some in the Method section below). Despite these limitations, I think Strava tweets could serve as a rough indicator of road cycling patterns. An added bonus is that the length of the ride is often included in tweets.
The chart above shows Dutch-language Strava tweets for the period April 2014 - March 2015. Whether you look at the number of rides or the total distance, there’s no early summer drop in cycling. There’s a peak in May, but none in August - September.
Sunset
According to the respondents of the SWOV study, 96% percent of accidents happened in daylight. Of course this doesn’t rule out that some accidents may have happened in the dusk and there may be a seasonal pattern to this.
Many tweets contain the time at which they were tweeted. This is a somewhat problematic indicator of the time at which trips took place, if only because it’s unclear how much time elapsed between the ride and the moment it was tweeted. But let’s take a look at the data anyway.
I think tweets tend to be posted rather early in the day. Also, the effect of switches between summer and winter time is missing in the median post time (perhaps Twitter converts the times to the current local time).
That said, the data suggests that rides take place closer to sunset during the winter, not during the months of May and August which show a rise in accidents. So, while no firm conclusions should be drawn on the basis of this data, there are no indications that daylight patterns can explain accident patterns.
Weather
Perhaps more accidents happen when many people cycle and there’s a lot of rain. In 2013, there was a lot of rain in May; subsequently the amount of rain declined, and there was a peak again in September (pdf). So at first sight, it seems that the weather could explain the accident peak in May, but not the one in August.
Conclusion
None of the explanations for the early summer drop in cycling accidents seem particularly convincing. It’s not so difficult to find possible explanations for the peak in May, but it’s unclear why this is followed by a decline and a second peak in August. This remains a bit of a mystery.
Method
Unfortunately, the Twitter API won’t let you access old tweets, so you have to use the advanced search option (sample url) and then scroll down (or hit CMD and the down arrow) until all tweets have been loaded. This takes some time. I used rit (ride) and strava as search terms; this appears to be a pretty robust way to collect Dutch-language Strava tweets.
It seems that Strava started offering a standard way to tweet rides as of April 2014. Before that date, the number of Strava tweets was much smaller and the wording of the tweets wasn’t uniform. So there’s probably little use in analysing tweets from before April 2014.
I removed tweets containing terms suggesting they are about running (even though I searched for tweets containing the term rit there were still some that were obviously about running) and tweets containing references to mountainbiking. I ended up with 9,950 tweets posted by 2,258 accounts. 1,153 people only tweeted once about a Strava ride. Perhaps the analysis could be improved by removing these.
I had to add 9 hrs to the tweet time, probably because I had been using a VPN when I downloaded the data.
A relevant question is how representative Strava tweets are of the amount of road cycling. According to the SWOV report, about two in three Dutch cyclists on racing bikes almost never use apps like Strava or Runkeeper; the percentage is similar for men and women. The average distance in Strava tweets is 65km; in the SWOV report most respondents report their average ride distance is 60 - 90km.
In any case, not all road cyclists use Strava and not all who use Strava consistently post their rides on Twitter (fortunately, one might add). Perhaps people who tweet their Strava rides are a bit more hardcore and perhaps more impressive rides are more likely to get tweeted.
Edit - the numbers reported above are for tweets containing the time they were posted; this information is missing in about one-third of the tweets.
Here’s the script I used to clean the twitter data.