Kudos for Strava Metro: How Planners Can Move from Individual Fitness to Community Wellness

Active transportation is a form of mobility that urban planners promote to improve community health. In response to this trend, an application known as 'Strava' has shared their data with municipalities to inform active transportation infrastructure. Strava is a fitness platform that tracks human movement through GPS. This paper argues that Strava can be leveraged by planners to expand their role in public health beyond active transportation through understanding wellness behaviors that inform community interventions. An inventory of municipal use of Strava was conducted to understand how municipalities are using the data. The findings indicate several common applications and limitations, revealing that municipalities rarely use the data beyond understanding cycling. Municipal reference to Strava provides a foundation for forging new ways that planners can work with the data, including diversifying the user base to inform equitable community interventions. This paper concludes with a set of recommendations for making this transition.