Since Feb 2014 carpet tacks have been spread on Melbourne's Kew Boulevard (The Boulie). Kew Boulevard is a quiet inner-city parkland road that is extremely popular with cyclists. The assumption is that the person spreading the tacks ("the Boulie Tacker") wants to disrupt cyclists and discourage them from using this road.
Read the background story from The Age newspaper(Jan 2016)
The Boulie Tacker seems to strike randomly, day or night, in various locations. So, to help shed some light on the Tacker's habits we've tried to find a pattern through analysis of Strava data.
Strava Segment shown below:
Our hypothesis was that most Strava users will not stop for long on this segment, but a Strava user that punctured would be stopped for 5 minutes or more. Therefore, looking at Strava data should allow us to spot puncture incidents, and grouping these will reveal a pattern of tack laying activity.
We contacted Strava expert Jonathan O'Keeffe. Using Strava APIs we now have a complete view of Northbound and Southbound Strava segment attempts from 2007 to Jun 2016, and we can see how often long stops (that may indicate punctures) occurred. We have produced from our initial analysis a data visualisation and have also made the complete data-set available should anyone wish to perform further analysis or join to other data-sets.
From the data sourced from Strava we have produced a simple data visualisation and have also made the complete data-set available should anyone wish to perform further analysis or join to other data-sets. Correlation with other observations would be extremely interesting to us!
Download here (Google Drive)
Or here (Dropbox)
The data is available to all – feel free to analyse yourselves – please use “Stop the Tacks” Facebook group as method of sharing. With your help, and perhaps matching to other data-sets we may be able to spot a pattern and narrow the search for the Boulie Tacker.
For further Information and crowdsolving ideas see Stop the Tacks facebook group:
