Origins and Destination data provides an in-depth way to understand mobility patterns in your area. To work with Strava Metro Origins and Destinations data with another analysis tool, you can export the O/D data you need directly from Metroview.
Origins & Destinations Data Export
In order to download Origins & Destinations data first select the Origins & Destinations view from the Maps tab of Metroview. In the lower right corner the data summary window provides an option to “Download Origins & Destinations data”.
Using the filter tools on the lower left side of Metroview, you can pre-filter your Origins and Destinations exports in a variety of ways. These selections will be reflected when you start the download process. With the available options, you can filter between:
- Origins & Destinations
- Trip Purpose
- Time of Day
- Days of week
- Time Period
After clicking the orange button, a download panel will appear with a selection tool to download just origins data, just destinations data, or both.
After making your data type selection and clicking the Terms of Use acknowledgement box, you can click “Save to Data”. This will queue your Origins and/or Destinations data export and can be found in the Data page. Depending on the date range and size of your dashboard boundary, the download can take some time to process. When ready, your requested data export will show an orange “Download” button which will kick off the download process to your device.
Upon downloading the .zip file to your computer, you can open the zip and work with the contained data files. When downloading both Origins and Destinations data, you will get a CSV for each. This is in addition to the shapefile (.shp) and its associated extensions.
Working with Origins and Destinations Data Exports
When you export Origins and Destinations data, you’ll have access to two types of files: a CSV of data and a shapefile of hexagons. If you’ve selected to download both Origins and Destinations data, you’ll have two CSVs included in the same folder - one for Origins and one for Destinations.
The hexagonal grid used for Origins and Destinations data in Metroview is built using the standard H3 grid system. H3 is an open-source geospatial indexing system that partitions the world into hexagonal cells. The CSV data file includes a hex_id column, which joins to the same field in the hexagon shapefile. There is one row in the CSV for each hexagon. The hex_id field utilizes the standard H3 ID field for each hexagon and are not unique/exclusive to Strava Metro data, meaning further joining of disparate datasets can be done on this field.
There are three informational columns in the CSV: date which will indicate either the month or year of data included in the file, origins_or_destinations to indicate the type of data, and activity_types to distinguish between bicycle activities and pedestrian activities.
The last set of columns includes the count of trips that either started in the given hexagon (for Origins data) or ended in the hexagon (for Destinations data). These are further subdivided based on the selected filters for trip purpose (commute, leisure, all), time of day (morning, midday, evening, overnight, all), and days of the week (weekday, weekend, all). The column names will indicate the selected filters and how those are applied to each column.
More details about the column naming conventions can be found in the Glossary & Data Dictionary.