Trying to export Streets data from Metroview? You've come to the right place!
*Looking for information about the Data Fields in your export files? Click here to open the Glossary and Data Dictionary page.*
*For information on Origins & Destinations Data Exports click here*
To download data, you'll first need to follow the steps in the below GIS Data Export section.
Any data that you have saved will be displayed on the Data page. Before the data is ready to download, the Link column will display "processing..." When the data is ready to download, the Link column will display an orange Download button.
You can sort files by creation date to more easily find what you're looking for. Click the Date Created column header to reverse the order.
GIS Data Export
There are three ways to download Streets GIS data from the Metroview platform:
Select Download Area Export
With the Select download area capability, you are able to select a focused area of street segments (edges) to download. To use this tool, first select the Streets view of the Map tab. The option to download a selected area will be highlighted in orange by default.
To select edges in a given area, click on the orange Select download area button on the right side panel. This will change your cursor, and indicate that you are now able to click and drag to draw the boundary area.
Selected areas that are larger than 9 square miles/23 square kilometers are considered to be large downloads in Metroview. Each organization in Metroview has a set maximum number of concurrent large downloads that can be processed at a time. If you exceed that number with a large selected area, a red dialog box will appear at the top of the map and the done button will be disabled. You can either select a smaller area for immediate results or return after your previously queued exports are ready for download.
There is also a maximum size limit for any selected area download. A selected area for export cannot exceed 25 square miles / 65 square kilometers. When your selection box is greater than this area, a different prompt will appear, asking you to select a smaller area. If you need a larger area than the maximum, consider making two separate selections or downloading the full Area of Interest.
After clicking "Done", the Selected Area Export window will open where you can specify your time frame and file name. Acknowledge the data confidentiality agreement and click "Save to Data". Your download will begin processing and will be available from the Data tab when ready. Please note that depending on area size and time frame, this may take some time to finish processing.
Full Area of Interest Export
To download data for your entire region, navigate to the Map tab and select Streets on the left side panel. After clicking on Streets, a panel will appear on the right side of the screen, indicating a few statistics for your entire area of interest.
Under the date there are two download tools immediately available for use. The white "Download entire area" button will download data for the date range and the entire area of interest shown in the right side panel. The aforementioned button may be "greyed out", if your organization has reached your maximum number of concurrent downloads. The tool is re-enabled when previous downloads finish processing.
To export data for a different date range, use the time period filter on the left side panel before clicking the download button.
After clicking on the Download button, a screen will pop up in the middle of the page where you can edit the filename and description of the data export.
Then, click on the Save to Data button. This will start the process of creating the data export – a zip file which includes the shapefile for the area of interest and a CSV file which includes the data. You can access this at any time by clicking on the Data tab at the top of the page. (Depending on the size of your area of interest and selected time frame, it may take some time for the shapefile export to finish processing.)
Selected Edges Export
To download data for a few specific street segments (edges), navigate to the Map tab and select Streets on the left side panel. A “Zoom in to load edges” button will appear near the left panel; click this to zoom in and load edges in the extent shown.
Select edges by clicking on the segments you want to export. A panel will appear on the right side of the screen, with an orange Download button below the date range. Now when you click on the Download button, only the selected edges will export (instead of the full area of interest). Edit the time frame by choosing hourly, daily, monthly, or yearly counts for your selected edge(s). Click Save to Data for your export to begin processing. This process may take some time depending on the number of selected edges and time frame. You can download the data at any time from the Data tab.
Working with the GIS Data
When you export GIS data from the Metroview dashboard, you’ll have access to two files – a CSV of data and an Open Street Map shapefile basemap.
To provide the Streets data, we map the Strava activity data onto OSM street and trail segments. We periodically pull new versions of OSM throughout the year, and then run additional processing on it to make it a routable basemap. We run a process that breaks all streets/trails/etc at intersections (decision points) to create Edges. When this occurs, we then need to apply a new ID to each Edge, because one OSM ID may (and likely does) now apply to multiple Edges. These Edge IDs are unique to the Strava data, and are unique to the specific basemap used at the time the data is created.
We have included two ID fields in the shapefile: osmId, which indicates the OSM geometry the segment is a part of, and edgeUID, which is used to join the data in the CSV to the shapefile. NOTE: the data cannot be joined to the osmId field. This is for reference only.
Depending on the time frame you have selected for the export, you may need to do additional filtering of the CSV file before joining it to the shapefile. This there’s a row in the CSV for every time interval (hours, days, months, or years respectively) that an edge had bicycle trips that traversed it. For instance, if you exported daily April 2023 data for Denver County, the CSV will include each edgeUID for every day in April that it had activities, meaning that most edges will appear multiple times in the CSV (and up to 30 times in April).
Similarly, when working with monthly counts, if your file contains more than 1 month of data make sure you filter the data first before joining to the shapefile.
All data is subject to several privacy protection methods, and must meet specific usage thresholds in order to protect the privacy of Strava users. If you do not see data at the time frame specified, please select a larger time frame. As a result of these measures, it is not recommended that users attempt to correlate smaller and larger time frames, as the counts will likely vary.