The Dublin Region Active Travel Dashboard has been launched to provide easier access to available data and some newly modelled data showing walking and cycling levels across the capital.
The sources of data include the Census, canal traffic counts around the city centre, permanent bicycle counters, Google Maps and Strava.
Smart Dublin, which was founded by the four Dublin local authorities to help expand access to open data, said on LinkedIn: “Open Data Lead Jack Kavanagh shared our newly developed Active Travel Data dashboard with those who attended last night’s event.”
“By engaging with various stakeholders, we were able to understand the common challenges and frustrations they face. After listening carefully, we took action and leveraged open data to benefit the city,” the group said.
Smart Dublin added: “This project is a testament to the power of collaboration. Sincere thanks to all who gave their time to this, we are very grateful. We will continue to improve it to deliver accessible active travel data for Dublin.”
Also on LinkedIn, Rudi O’Reilly Meehan, a data designer who helped create the project with Smart Dublin, said: “This dashboard incorporates active travel data from the capital from 5 different sources, namely Census commuting patterns, Google trips, pedestrian and cycle counters, Strava Metro and Dublin City Council canal cordons. It is very much a living platform which will incorporate new data sources as they become available.”
“To paraphrase what Lorraine D’Arcy said at the launch event last night – while having this top-down data is great, it often obscures the huge impact that changes at a street or junction level can have,” he said.
He added: “Thanks to Jack Kavanagh and Alan Murphy for bringing me in on this- it is our hope that this approach can be replicated in other regions.”
The data displayed includes the fixed bicycle counters across different council areas, but some recent data is missing, and some older data is patchy on some counters. It is noted on the dashboard that the counter unit’s manufacturer, Eco-Visio, “are investigating issues with some counters.”
Route-based estimates for use is also provided for four routes across the city. The dashboard notes: “The Route view shows the results of the Dublin Strava Cycling Model, developed by Smart Dublin to estimate the volume of bicycle traffic along key routes in Dublin.”
It adds: “The model uses Strava Metro data as a basis to extrapolate the total estimated volume of bicycle traffic. Initially, the model has been applied to 4 different routes across the Dublin region for 2021-2023.”
The dashboard can be found at https://active-travel-dublin.vercel.app.
