This reminds me of how Strava encourages users to tick the "share my data with city transportation planners" box and make it sound to users like they're awesome

This reminds me of how Strava encourages users to tick the "share my data with city transportation planners" box and make it sound to users like they're awesome dudes who share this data to be great citizens helping out The Cause for alternative transportation. ...and then I talked to an urban planner who told me that: * Strava's data was worthless to them, mostly because the vast majority of transportation riders do not even remotely care about mapping their transportation riding so there isn't much data and it has a huge skew toward the riding habits of white, wealthy, tech bros and social media gals. The kind of people who are already well-represented at community meetings, emailed surveys, and traffic counts centered around 9-5 commuters. It's the "invisible" commuters - migrant, blue collar, service industry - especially shift workers - who are difficult to try and find/count. They can't afford to show up to 4pm city hearings, may not speak english, or it simply never occurs to them to look for any of this and bike advocacy orgs have historically done a terrible job of outreach (many are aware of this and have been trying to work on it, or at least try to account for the bias.) * The data isn't provided free of charge, and in fact its provided at prohibitively expensive rates compared to other data sources, even for a relatively small city. I don't remember the exact figures, but I believe for a east coast small city it was "approaching a mile of bike lane" costs, ie tens of thousands of dollars.