Hello ​@mattithurburn 

Thank you for your post.

We strive to bring in new updates from OSM in a timely manner while still ensuring fairness, correctness, and completeness of data. 

We work with a company called Mapbox to provide most of the actual maps that athletes see, including those that are used to draw and display Routes. You can read more about what goes into those maps here. Like Strava, Mapbox uses OSM, though the rate of ingestion of new changes in OSM does not always line up between the two. This means that what you may see on the maps (from Mapbox) may be slightly different than what actually gets drawn when you attempt to make a Route inside Strava, especially for very recent OSM changes.

OSM relies on many contributors, not just yours. In addition, OSM and Mapbox are just some of the data sources that Strava integrates. As a result, changes you make may not be reflected exactly the way you may expect them on Strava. For example, if you mark a road as closed to bicycle traffic, that road may still be included in suggested cycling routes if other data sources indicate that the road is open to bicycles. Keeping this in mind not all feedback is implemented, or can take quite some time to implement, and even then we rely on MapBoxes updates to display those changes in Strava. 
 

Also please keep in mind that you can use manual mode for route planning:
Enable Manual mode to add a waypoint anywhere on the map. There are a few things to be aware of when using this mode:

• Manual mode will no longer ensure your route's path follows roads or trails.
• Popularity and elevation selectors will be disabled.
• Distance and elevation can only be roughly estimated for manual edits.

I hope that provides some clarification.

Hi ​@mattithurburn , 

I’ve done lots of OSM updates over the years; I’ve asked similar questions and made a couple of observations that might be of interest.

Some edits take several months to update to Strava map and routing and the updates appear to be a block process I.e. all the OSM edits for a period update together (possibly by geographical areas, not whole world together).

The image of the map and the routing seem to be separate and aren’t updated together. This can mean routing doesn’t exactly match the map as edits filter through.

I think the map updates more frequently than the routing and I’ve suspected this is because mapbox has to run something to convert OSM to the routing software that’s harder, than the map, to do frequently…