Hey Strava, 

I’ve noticed the following troubling pattern related to the segment consolidation effort.

Let’s say there is an old segment based on trails that no longer exist because there has been some rerouting or just a segment based on a very poor quality GPS data. A new segment is created from a very accurate GPS track produced with a recently released GPS watch with dual-band GPS to correct both the segment track and the distance. At the same time the old inaccurate segment is hidden.

What I discover some time later is that the accurate segment is gone without a warning - simply gone. The inaccurate segment remains but remains hidden for me. So at the end I have neither. 

When Strava consolidates segments it would be reasonable to check them against the heatmap and see which one is closest to recent activities. If the consolidation is based purely on the popularity or a number of hits is the main criteria, how would it be possible to account for the trail reroutings?

Consider the following example:

I remember creating a segment to match the new trail (the blue line above). Yet, that segment is simply gone and the old segment (the red line) remains. Not only the old trail no longer exists, but as you can see the old segment was based on much less accurate GPS data. The blue line shows out and back track, which is obviously much more accurate. Furthermore, the old segment distance is less than 7 miles while the actual distance on the new trail is almost 8 miles. 

How can be influence the consolidation logic so that it keeps better segments? Also, in general, how can we prevent good high quality longer segments from being deleted by Strava? It seems that the consolidation effort not only deletes newer higher better quality segments but it also seems to prefer shorter segments over longer segments, which results in deleting logical segments (e.g. trailhead to summit) and keeping uninteresting short segments that make less sense - that start nowhere and end nowhere.