London tops the list of cities with the most run commuters, according to Strava’s recently-released 2017 Year in Sport report, while Amsterdam, Paris, New York City, and Sydney, Australia round out the top five.
We’re fairly certain that our friends at Corridaamiga were solely responsible for #8, São Paulo, Brazil, as they are at the forefront of run commuting advocacy in that city.
What is even more exciting to see, is how much run commuting has grown over the last year. The number of run commuters grew by 43% and the number of runs tagged as commutes is up 51%! While these numbers come only from those that use Strava to record their run commutes, last year alone, 136 million runs were uploaded. That’s a ridiculously large set of data to analyze.
While the percentage growth is impressive, the actual numbers are even more amazing. Over 31,000 run commutes were recorded weekly in the United States alone! Let’s break that down a bit.
According to our 2014 International Survey of Run Commuting, a majority of respondents said they ran to and/or from work 2 – 4 days a week. Lets go with the middle number of 3, and assume they ran to and from work, for a total of 6 commute events per week, per person. Now, if 31,169 commutes are recorded per week, and each run commuter racks up 6 of those, then that means approximately 5,194 people are run commuting in the United States each week!
Obviously, we’re making some assumptions here, but even at the high end of our guesstimate, saying that the only people who recorded commutes every week, worked 7 days a week and ran both to and from work (14 commute events per week), the number still comes out to 2,226 run commuters!
And the grand total of Strava-recorded run commutes in the U.S. over the past year?
1,620,788!
We’re seriously blown away. We knew you were out there running to work, but we had no idea you were doing it so much. Keep it up throughout the next year and all years to come!
If you are not using Strava to record your run commutes, please make 2018 the year you start doing so! You can sync your fitness tracker to it, and then tag your run as “commute” on the phone app once your done. There is also a Global Run Commute Crew club you can join (currently at 125 members). See you on the streets!
I’ve been run commuting for a year or 2 now (and cycling commuting for 7 or 8 years) but i never tag my strava activities as commutes, I’ll start from now and that’ll be an extra 400 commutes (for Birmingham UK) in next year’s figures!!
ps love the site keep the updates coming please.