Better Bike and Pedestrian Data for
Better Bike and Pedestrian Infrastructure.
In order to improve bike and pedestrian safety and encourage mode shift in our cities, planners and decision makers need the best data available to make sound decisions on infrastructure and policy. Replica now has the most comprehensive and trustworthy bike and pedestrian data available on the market.
Replica’s unique approach to data gives the public sector a remarkably clear picture of mobility in their communities. With the most accurate, recent, and comprehensive bike and pedestrian data on the market, analysts and decision makers can better understand:
people are walking and biking – origins / destinations, link volumes, peak times
they’re walking and biking – trip purpose, trip attributes
socio-economic and demographic backgrounds, access to vehicles
travel has changed over time
Image: Identifying bicycle and pedestrian movements on all roads in Pioneer Valley MPO in Replica
With Replica data, it's possible to answer new questions about bicyclists and pedestrians.
Existing bike and pedestrian data is often outdated, incomplete, and lacking full representation of our communities. These traditional sources are often:
Data that skews toward recreational cycling or that solely relies on connected vehicle pings and/or location based services cannot provide meaningful information on actual walking and biking patterns in any given area. In fact, the inconsistency of location-based data has caused other transportation data providers to halt the production of bike and pedestrian data.
Replica addresses these limitations by taking a composite approach to data sourcing that combines cutting edge machine learning with more traditional travel modeling processes, helping to mitigate any issues related to location-based services data volatility, sample biases, and small sample sizes.
This means that we account for every person in any given community and route every trip of every person – giving us rich and recent information on who is walking and biking, where they’re going, and for what purpose. Our outputs are informed, calibrated, and validated by dozens of diverse data sources with billions of data points, making our methods transparent and our data quality unmatched.
Bicyclists and pedestrians are an important part of what makes our communities more sustainable and more livable, yet – they continue to be our most vulnerable road users. They deserve better data for better bike and pedestrian infrastructure.
At Replica we understand that in order to utilize data, you first need to trust it. The best way to gain trust in data is to compare it to data you've already collected. To help ease the process of utilizing Replica Data, we are partnering with public agencies and consulting firms to perform Data Validations. Reach out to our team to partner in performing a Data Validation.
In January 2023, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) released Extending Transit's Reach, a strategic action plan that seeks to enhance bicycle, pedestrian, and micro-mobility access to transit stations and other MTA facilities in the New York metropolitan area. The team used Replica data on bike trip usage, data from the American Community Survey (ACS), and Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) to divide the MTA’s subway stations into tiers based on a number of demographic factors. As noted in the plan, Extending Transit's Reach "[leverages] the industry's latest best practices and extensive data analysis to identify areas of greatest need within [the MTA] system." Replica data supported the existing conditions assessment that set the stage for the plan's bold recommendations.
El Paso wanted to look at whether building walkable places actually results in more walking thus reducing the number of vehicular trips . This would also address the issues of equity by make the city a more accessible place by not making car ownership a prerequisite. They turned to Replica to gather data on mode split. With Replica they were able to show the percentage of trips made walking or biking compared to the total trip origins from a specific block group. Through this analysis they were able to show that the downtown area has both a high walk score and the highest rate of trips made by walking or bike. Meanwhile, the fringes of the city have both low walk scores and a low percentage of trips made by walking or biking.
When Broward County received funding to upgrade thermal bike/ped detection equipment for intersections in the county, they needed information on which intersections to prioritize these upgrades. They used Replica to capture total bike and pedestrian trips on weekdays and weekends across the intersections of interest, then layered on bike/ped crash data to rank the intersections from highest to lowest priority for sensor equipment upgrades. Broward was excited about what Replica could provide and requested the data for another 1500 intersections for a countywide assessment.
Replica conducted an analysis to serve as a resource for the City of New York in advancing the commitment by the Mayor and NYC DOT to implement safety improvements at 1,000 intersections across the five boroughs. With nearly 50,000 intersections citywide, there is substantial benefit to using Replica data to support the process of analyzing and prioritizing the intersections (as well as subsequently measuring the impact of improvements). Using a composite of data sources from NYC Open Data and Replica data, Replica created a dynamic visualization that enables the City to analyze a number of factors such as intersection-specific crash statistics, travel activity, and equity considerations based on the socioeconomic and demographic characteristics of the trip takers when prioritizing the desired locations for safety improvements.
Replica’s Places data was used by TN DOT to investigate change in bicycling and pedestrian activity in Nashville and ultimately created a justification for a Complete Street on Dickerson Pike.
In this webinar we discussed: