Concerning cycling, many cities usually only know roughly how many people are cycling every day. Until recently, the main methods of collecting this information were human or mechanical counts and labor-intensive surveys. Today, automatic bicycle counters exist that can be used to estimate the total amount of users on a portion of a route (eg. pneumatic tubes laid across the roadway, piezo-electric sensors embedded in the roadway, inductive loops cut into the roadway, devices using some sort of transmitting energy such as radar waves or infrared beams to detect vehicles passing over the roadway), Just like the monitoring system for car traffic, there are also camera systems that count cyclists, some even with automatic user recognition.
However, the newest technology to capture big amounts of cycling data is to use a GPS tracking activity device (eg. smartphone). Checking our surroundings, it seems like every city has or is developing an application for bicycle use. To name a few: Bike your City (Athens/Greece), Ring Ride (Vienna/Austria), Cykelstaden (Gothenburg), Bike citizen, GéoVélo (French cities), Strava Metro, Bikes vs. Cars (Malmö/Skåne and Cykelfrämjandet), BikePrint (Netherlands), etc.
Cities that don’t have a big budget to develop an own app, can join the European Cycling Challenge, a competition to motivate citizens to cycle more combined with an app to collect cycling data and the necessary Heatmaps to analyse the collected data. Initiated in Bologna in 2012 and now over 30 EU-cities joined the annual Challenge.