While Strava was originally designed by its creators as a convenient means for urban athletes to record the particulars of their journeys on either foot or bike, city planners have discovered that it could serve as a powerful tool for enhancing urban infrastructure design.

The smart phone app is capable of tracing the precise routes taken by cyclists and joggers during the course of their fitness-prompted peregrinations. In addition to providing a visual depiction of their routes in the form of an overlay on a Google map, the app also provides a host of detailed statistics including average speed, total travel distance and elevation gains.

This detailed information could prove to be immensely useful to the designers of urban infrastructure in future by conferring them with vast swathes of data concerning the current and likely movements of both cyclists and pedestrians.

Read more via Sourceable