BEGIN seminar – Dr David McArthur
Date: 18 February 2020
Time: 15:00-16:00
Venue: School VI
Understanding and promoting cycling using crowdsourced data
Cycling is increasingly seen as a way of dealing with a variety of social problems: from dealing with the climate emergency to improving public health. Unfortunately, in the UK cycling is not a common mode choice. Governments have made money available to encourage more people to get on their bikes. A large portion of this money has been spent on new infrastructure. However, it hasn’t always been easy to evaluate whether this is effective due to a lack of appropriate data. In recent years, the proliferation of smartphones and activity-tracking apps such as Strava has made new, detailed mobility data available to researchers. In this talk, I will present some of the ways we have been making use of this data at the Urban Big Data Centre (UBDC).
Biography
David McArthur is Senior Lecturer in Transport Studies and Associate Director of the Urban Big Data Centre at the University of Glasgow. An economist by training, his current work looks at how new and emerging forms of data can be used to better understand cities; with a particular focus on the promotion of walking and cycling as modes of transport.