Segments are a big feature of Strava and I think everything should be done to keep them as legit as possible. However I often see people riding ebikes but don't know/care about setting the correct type of their activity once uploaded. Since it defaults to classic bike (non assisted), it leads to pollution of the leaderboards with performances achieved only thanks to the assistance.
To address this issue I suggest the following :
- Make segment leaderboards accessible only to rides with a selected "gear" (bike)
- Make ebike an option of the gear setup : it is either an ebike or it is not. No one seriously rides an ebike with the motor turned off 100% of the time, setting it per-ride makes no sense.
- Use the ebike (on or off) flag of the selected gear (bike) to set the correct activity type upon upload (bike or ebike).
- If the gear is changed on an existing activity, flag it accordingly (ebike or regular).
- If the user want's to change an existing gear from "ebike" to "classic bike", at least ask for a solid confirmation as this is most likely someone trying to be outsmart the system...
The idea behind this is to not rely on the user's good will to set the correct activity type for each upload. It would make things automatic, given the initial action of creating the gear. If none is selected/created, then we can assume that the user does not care that much about performance, and has no interest in leaderboards anyways.
In the end both ebikes and regular bikes segment leaderboards would make more sense to people who actually care about them, without making things any harder for users.
P.S I have nothing against ebikes, they're fantastic but deserve their own separate leaderboards as in any bike race allowing both types of bikes !
