5.6 billion miles cycled on Strava in 2019

This year, Strava is celebrating its 10th year of helping people to log and share their physical activities.

The Year in Sport report was published on Wednesday and released various statistics gathered through the app, which currently has 48 million people in 195 countries and is growing quickly at a rate of a million new people a month signing up.

Specific to the UK, the data showed that 7.5% of adults are on Strava and data showed they cumulatively ran 308.5 million kilometres and cycled 937.2 million kilometres.

“The growth of distance running on Strava is mind blowing, and something I don’t believe has been captured effectively in the past,” Strava’s UK country manager Gareth Mills said in a statement.

“As we are living increasingly sedentary lifestyles, particularly in developed countries, perhaps the call of the marathon or ultramarathon distance becomes a way of combating this trend for many of our community.”

The data also revealed that the gender divide in cycling is worse in the UK compared to the other European countries, with women in the UK being 12% less likely to cycle when commuting than men, compared to a global average of 6.7%. The percentage of female commuters is a metric that is often used in transport planning to assess the quality of the cycling environment. This is due to female riders are generally more risk-averse than male riders, and a higher percentage of female riders indicates that a city’s cycling infrastructure is achieving its goals.

“The data also spotlights areas for improvement,” Mills added. “It is disappointing to see that British women are much less likely to commute by bike than men compared to the global average, and we should refocus on the root causes.”

Other stats showed that the peak ride start time on weekdays was 8am, something that can be easily attributed to a morning commute. In total, 2019 saw riders commute 315.1 million miles with a median distance of 5.2 miles. Taking these miles into consideration, cycling commuters have offset 140,329 tons of CO2.

Across all cycling activities, 5.6 billion miles were cycled, with the average distance per ride being 16.2 miles and an average elevation gain of 659 feet, with an activity duration of 1 hour, 18 minutes and 48 seconds.