Add the ability to rate and comment on routes

[CreakyCrank]

I can't find any place to search for "human generated" routes, that I would have some confidence that somebody created.  (I can, on mobile, get some routes suggested - but in many cases, these end up being dangerous, and are not user generated from what I can tell). 

I can create a new route, see my saved routes that I have made, but I can't seem to search for routes others have made. 

My feature suggestion is: have a searchable set of routes, created by Strava athletes.  Have a 'rating system' (5 stars perhaps), where people could rate the route, as well as a counter of how many people have rated it (and perhaps, how many times it has been used).   There could also be a comment attached to rating/review, such that people can comment on any issues with the route (crosses a busy street, don't use at a certain time due to rush-hour traffic, etc.).  This would give the ability to feel confident in the safety of a route.

[Bryant]

Monday (Sept 12, 2022)

[Tbg]

100% agreed. When cycling in a new, unfamiliar area I would love to be able to rely on a 4.5⭐ rated route from a local strava user. Whatever I plan manually or automatically in the strava route planner is never going to match the tip from the local cycling club. Honestly, this applies even to my home area...

Would be nice to chat with fellow strava user about routes etc.

Lack of this feature makes me use a competitor of Strava from time to time. That competitor product has user created routes nicely curated and searchable.

[Vincenzo]

Please allow the opportunity to review routes and segments. Anyone could share his impressions about any aspect of the trail such as difficulty and rate it on a five star scale. This could allow to underline best routes and hide bad ones. 

[Bryant]

We appreciate your participation in the Community. It’s not entirely clear from your post what you’re suggesting here. Do you mind elaborating and including more details on the topic? We kindly ask that you review our Ideas guidelines, particularly the “What makes a good idea” section, to ensure that your ideas are clear, concise, and can reach as many others as possible.

[Vincenzo]

Ciao Bryant. I mean  the opportunity to ler the users review the route just done. Voting could be based on five stars. Users could evaluate beauty, difficulty, easy to follow...

For example: difficulty (one star for simple, five star for hard) 

[couling]

Others have pointed out that Strava route finder sometimes uses very unsafe roads.  Frequently the excuse for this is that Strava uses OpenStreetMap as the underlying map.  But that doesn't cover the issue of what is safe or otherwise feels safe.  OpenStreeMap doesn't record how cyclist feel about particular legal routes and doesn't record actual cases of incidents.

The issue of unsafe roads has been a huge problem since cycling route finders began.  Strava's heatmap based is a really powerful tool for finding fun rides. However mapping the roads that cyclists frequently use only get's half the picture.

Feature request:

Let cyclists mark sections of roads a "no-go" or "do not use". If this was immediately part of the Routes UI it could either record for just that one route or all future routes for the user.

While it would be really useful for just that user, it would also provide information to Strava so that Strava could build up an inverse heatmap of undesirable roads to overlay with the heatmap of popular roads.

Eg: if I have a ride which contained a really hair raising section of busy and dangerous road, the first thing I do when I get home is to "fix" the route to avoid it.  Currently, I must pull the route off the undesirable road.  But what would be much better is to simply mark that section of road as "no go" and let the route finder figure out the alternative.

Why heatmap isn't enough

Here in the UK there's a fairly obvious collection of unsafe / undesirable roads.  Literally any road number starting with "A" and a speed limit above 30mph with no off road cycle path (eg: A34).  These are legal for cyclists! But it most other respects they are a motorway / freeway.

And yet A roads too often get used in strava route finder and show up on the heatmap.  One explanation for this is that local knowledge can sometimes trump the danger.  For example A roads can be subject to a lot of slow moving traffic at peak times and commuter cyclists will take advantage of the traffic jams. "Sure I'll cycle along that road at 8:30 am on my way to work, but at any other time I'd get killed"

It is complex, because sometimes an A road is fine for 100m if there's a disjointed cross roads.  Sometimes you just have to cross the A road, and that's legal and (mostly) fine.  But that's a totally different story to a route taking me down 5-6 miles of A road.

A heatmap marking a road is undesirable would be a good way to counter the inevitble truth that undesirable roads also show up in the heatmap sometimes.

[jacobuserasmus]

Strava being able to route based on the safety of a road has become critical where I live.

In our cases, an unsafe route means a route where cyclists are highjack (at gun point). Bicycle are stolen and cyclist are hurt. So for us knowing if a route is safe is VERY important. But even more important is that it can change day to day hour to hour.

Eg. Certain routes can be traversed on Saturday morning as they are busy but at any other time of the week you should avoid them. Being able to use Strava to warn me when these routes are unsafe would literally be a lifesaver.

[Ethanhiro]

Some strava routes aren't very ideal, and lead onto bad paths/roads. I think it would be better if people could view and review paths after they use it, and give it a rating to give other users who use the route later some sort of an idea on what other real users think about it. A viewcount would help to see popularity of these routes too.

[Gushaas]

Hi all. We went trail running last weekend and crossed a bit technical ridge (Dent de Cons in the Bauges mountains close to Annecy) with my girlfriend. Apart from pictures of the trail, or time spent by other athletes to "run" the section, we didn't find any information about the technical difficulty of the ridge.

We thought it could be great to be able to attribute a score to grade the technical difficulty of a trail section. It could be an already known segment or a section choosed by users. The score could be a five star-grade including steepness, exposure, terrain... By adding all the scores given by users you would get an average representing the technical difficulty showing up when creating a route. 

[JH94]

It would be helpful if there was the ability to add  concise notes to routes. For example I followed a suggested route in Ravenna Italy that included a long stretch on a busy country road with no shoulder.  The route would have been great on a Sunday morning but was dangerous in the late afternoon when I ran it. Route creators and users should be able to include brief notes on routes. 

[JH94]

This would be awesome. Sometimes the generated routes use busy streets which are dangerous. 

[FatalKeystroke]

A user submitted rating system on road, sidewalk, or path conditions would be useful for a wide array of activities (including my main interest of inline skating as well as being a generally useful crowd sourced dataset). 

Strava already collects anonymized route data to generate their maps of users commonly taken routes, optionally asking for feedback on the average road conditions of the route taken then combining the data into a heat map would be extremely useful. 

This would allow viewing road conditions during route planning for considerations such as street only vs off-road bikes, whether rivers want a smooth run or are willing to go down a gravel path or off-road, or in my instance determine which routes my ankles won't be shredded jello after a 10 mile loop because of poor road conditions. 

And this is useful data for road analysis if Stravas data collection ToS includes reselling anonymized datasets. Likely several entities from Google Maps to the Department of Transportation would be interested in the information. 

[Jan_Mantau]

This rating system already exists on OpenStreetmap where Strava sources its maps from. Strava could display that.

[ChadNBNC]

I think a playlist similar to the way YouTube music does it would be wonderful. It would be great to make a list of rides accessible to others and allow comments on the rides. For instance, North Carolina Travel Center rides. You could save rides out of travel centers in North Carolina and others could contribute rides to it.  You could allow others to comment on the rides, whether they enjoyed them or maybe if there is a dog at mile 3 to be careful of. The possibilities would be endless. (East Coast Greenway rides, Tennessee Hills, Pennsylvania battlefields, etc...)

[Vincenzo]

Ciao Strava. If a rating sistem it's not easy to be implemented please allow athletes to kudo routes. Strava routes at the moment is useless...