If you’ve ever wondered about the best route for a run, a long walk or a bike ride around Decatur or Atlanta, you’d probably consider the routes where folks walk/run/bike the most.
But up until the advent of the smartphone, this was something difficult to visualize on a map for large swaths of the world. But thanks to mapping software and smartphone apps like RunKeeper, we can begin to map the most trafficked (or at least exercised!) routes around Atlanta – and the world!
A company called Mapbox has taken the data from 1.5 million runs, walks and bike rides from RunKeeper and turned it into one giant interactive map that you can play with HERE. The brighter the line, the most frequented the route.
As you can see above, main routes in Decatur aren’t entirely surprising. The PATH trail, West Ponce and Oakview seem to be the main walk/run/bike corridors within the city. But zoom in a little closer and you can see all kinds of interesting patterns. For instance, the most popular route to take thru the Decatur Cemetery is along the western road.
Runners and bikers prefer hoofing it around the west side of the Old Courthouse and Confederate monument downtown.
And zooming out can also reveal interesting trends. For instance, east of Decatur and Avondale there’s little evidence of app-exercise aside from the PATH Trail, which links up with a very popular exercise route around Stone Mountain Park.
To the west of Decatur, the PATH through Freedom Parkway, the Beltline and routes through Piedmont Park really pop out.
Check it out for yourself!
And also see The Atlantic CityLab’s summary of patterns seen throughout many U.S. Cities. (Spoiler Alert: People love exercising by the water)
This kind of thing wakes up my inner research geek…. Without knowing who uses Runkeeper, it’s impossible to know what to make of this information, i.e., whether it correlates to any degree at all with trail usage by the general population.
Yep that’s why I tried to make sure to qualify it. It is what it is.
interestingly missing: the path from my sofa to the refrigerator
We have 9 Decatur routes we use weekly for our weekly walking club, Walk With a Doc, led by the Rec Center; check them out too on our walking map: http://www.decaturga.com/walking
I live in Scottdale and run some pretty wacky routes. Not for the fainthearted. I’m only 3 miles from downtown Decatur, but I don’t usually like going more than 3-4 miles so I don’t head that way. Jogging through Clarkston is fascinating. Unless I hit up the path system briefly, I never see anyone else jogging.