BIKEPGH MESSAGE BOARD ARCHIVE

One result is that I think the website this year to input miles and view results super stinks. (;

The NBC site is annoyingly opaque... Anyway, the info you want is at: National->Leaderboards->Local Challenges We find: Pittsburgh is nationally ranked #11, with 4.06 points (1218 riders) Cleveland is nationally ranked #19 with 1.09 points (1610 riders) There were 71 registered challengers. I think this means we "win", at least in the matter of Cleveland. I'm not really sure how all that math works, but every team above us, bar one, had fewer registered riders. We did beat this one outfit with 5500 [sic] riders (dilettantes, clearly). And who in turn beat Cleveland. My general impression is that geography (i.e. flat) helps a lot. Apparently Cleveland chose not to leverage their advantage on this dimension. Or ride all that much. Can we now take our rightfully deserved niche in the pantheon enshrining the Pirates and the Steelers?

Please don't talk about the Pirates and the Steelers... not this week, at least.

All I know is that this challenge helped me get on the bike a lot more this summer. On Oct 1, I surpassed my 2013 mileage total. And I didn't even sign up for the beer card.

http://www.newsnet5.com/news/local-news/cleveland-metro/national-bike-challenge-cleveland-beats-pittsburgh-as-local-cyclists-bring-home-rust-belt-cup it's on teh internet, it must be true.

Weird, because on the leaderboard for large communities we're ranked #4 and Cleveland #10. Maybe the point system needs to be a bit more transparent.

Agree about the point system... it's not even remotely transparent as displayed on the NBC site. To quote Shelli (the person running the challenge on the CLE end): "It is based on the sum of points calculated by all riders, not what the NBC site shows which is based on a percentage (aka: per 1000 riders). This is how we did it last year too...and both years we had to extract the data and manually add it. Last year, your riders were 1. higher in number than CLE and 2. Made more "trips" vs. CLE which had more miles, but not points."

I've been watching what's been going on in Cle from a distance, and this is the outcome I would have assumed without any actual count. They are doing amazing over there, crushing. This is a photo from a night ride they had during a recent weekend event. 1500 riders. This wasn't even the main event. I can only assume that they didn't place higher nationally because not every rider bothered to log.

"I can only assume that they didn’t place higher nationally because not every rider bothered to log." What really hurts them is that their mileage is split between Cleveland and Lakewood. A lot of the higher mileage peeps are in Lakewood (or at least, that was the case last year, maybe they got smart and changed zipcodes in order to get the cup?).

That's because LeBron moved back and was using the Q as his Hone address.

^Like.

from drewbacca - What really hurts them is that their mileage is split between Cleveland and Lakewood. A lot of the higher mileage peeps are in Lakewood (or at least, that was the case last year, maybe they got smart and changed zipcodes in order to get the cup?). According to the blog post today on this fine website, it seems that bikepgh has shot themselves in the tire/foot by only including allegheny county (about 1.2 million) vs. bikecle choosing about 5-6 surrounding counties (about 2.5 million). This would be like us including Butler, Beaver, Westmoreland, and Washington in our analysis. Which begs the question, why don't we do the same thing? We have about 200 fewer registered riders and 50% less population in our catchment area. If we expanded our county range for the competition next year we would smash bikecle with ease. Seems like we are trying to arm wrestle with both hands tied behind our back.

Meh. I'd rather we concentrate on what's important: Getting more people on bikes and riding for basic transportation. It'd be real nice if they logged their miles, too.

I'm glad they won -- seems they really put in the effort. Maybe we'll recruit more next year, and it will become a way to get more people biking in both cities, the way it was intended. Who knows, they might even fix the website someday so we'll be able to tell who's ahead.

Here's the NBC survey, where you can enter comments about their website which they would have found out before release if they had bothered to do any user testing: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/nationalbikechallenge

I'm not in the picture (I was late), but I was at the Night Ride, as well as the next day's Forest City Fundo (their version of PedalPGH). It was just as awesome as it sounds. (Also, their roads are obscenely wide and underused, so while I had a couple buzzes in 40 miles of riding that Sunday, I didn't have nearly as many issues as I do here. OTOH, most of them are posted 35mph, which is a bit scary.)

It would be rather whingey to start talking about changing the rule structure because we lost. We won one under this structure, lost one. Ride more. That's the point.

What I said in my response was that I got good at logging my miles in prior challenges, and kept it up in non-challenge periods. That made it easy to see how my biking was increasing in general, as was my courage at dealing with traffic.

Whining is fun. Plus, I grew up in CLE but have since become a yinzer, so I have an excuse to want to change the rules to serve my own immature needs. (;

Well, I'm just plain confused. The data I pointed to is the early post suggested (to me) that Pgh won the challenge. Maybe the math really is harder than I thought; or maybe I should just accept that diagnosis of precocious senility...

> The data I pointed to is the early post suggested (to me) that Pgh won the challenge. the problem is that, in order to include their suburbanites, neither org uses just the core city itself (which is what the data you were looking at is based on); they have to pick a metro area--and CLE's was apparently a bit more broadly defined.