OceanaGold | Waihi North Project | Recreation and tourism assessment 22 Figure 12 shows average daily counts for the track counter (both directions) by month from September 2019 to December 2021. Patronage levels have been reasonably steady but marked by busy periods over Easter in 2021 and during the October school holidays in 2020. 3.2.4 Strava data Figure 13 shows the Strava heatmap for ‘running’ in the southern Coromandel Range for the 12 months up to November 2020. More recent Strava heatmap data are available, but show no activity on the Wharekirauponga to Golden Cross Track, and so the older data have been retained to indicate the location of the Track. Strava is a social media application which uses GPS records from subscribers’ smartphones and other devices uploaded to a central database, allowing speed and time comparisons with other cyclists, runners, walkers and trampers (for example), and the monitoring of individual activity or training targets. While the service is popular with professional athletes, its membership is dominated by casual recreation participants. Strava indicated that it had 50 million international users in early 2020 (80% outside the US) with an additional million joining per month.8 It is now popular amongst regular cyclists and runners. Comparisons between different forms of data gathering show a degree of reliability for Strava data with a range of 1% to 12% of users recorded on-site that are connected to the service; and this is growing.9 Comparisons between track counter data and Strava records undertaken by the author of this report in Nelson show levels of Strava adoption of more than a third of mountain bikers and between 7% and 20% of pedestrians depending on location (the more remote, the higher the uptake). 8 https://blog.strava.com/press/strava-milestones-50-million-athletes-and-3-billion-activity-uploads/ and https://www.bikebiz.com/cycling-insight-strava/ 9 Herrero, J. 2016. Using big data to understand trail use: three Strava tools. TRAFx Research. And see https://medium.com/strava-metro/cdc-finds-strava-metro-data-correlates-strongly-with-census-active-commuting-data8ab1be0fe130 Figure 12: Wharekirauponga Track average daily count by month 2019-2021
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjE2NDg3