Timeline

Dr. Nadine Schuurman and Aateka Shashank publish study on walkability in local neighbourhoods. A literature review on runnability was conducted, but nothing was found, leading Dr. Schuurman to coin the runnability term for further studies.

Dr. Scott Lear from SFU Faculty of Health Sciences purchases Strava data for Metro Vancouver.

The Runner Survey was successfully promoted on social media platforms, gaining over two thousand responses from runners globally.

Aateka Shashank and Dr. Schuurman create an initial runnability index, which they call the Rough Runnability Index (RRI). The RRI calculates a number of criteria associated with running.

After publication of Aateka Shashank and Dr. Schuurman's RRI paper, further studies followed:

Drs. Schuurman, Rosenkrantz and Lear publish preferences of road runners in June 2021 using information from the Runner Survey.

3 data pools are now being used: Runner Survey data, Owner Authorization (O-Auth) data, and Strava data.

Dr. Schuurman and Stella Harden (PhD Candidate) publish paper on utility of Street View Imagery (SVI) in environmental audits for runnability, November 2023.

Drs. Rosenkrantz, Schuurman and Lear publish a second paper on preferences of trail runners in January 2024 (info from survey).

Stella Harden (PhD Candidate) is working on machine learning techniques to analyze narratives posted by runners to social media like Strava, using large language models to pull major themes from o-auth data.

NOW:
We are continuing to study runnability, adding to it by working on environmental scans and public surveys.

You can find out more here on our site, with links to our researchers and publications.

A new survey will be conducted in the near future, so be sure to check back frequently to have a chance to (help out and) join the race to improve runnability!