"Relative" Popularity Routing

[robbertmijn]

If instead you "score" the popularity of a road based on "relative" popularity (i.e., correct for road popularity in a 5km radius), the automatic planner might avoid super busy urban areas!

I really like the popularity routing feature ("follow most popular" in desktop, I assume it's switched on by default in the mobile version). It allows me to get from point A to B using safe and nice roads. 

I'm curious how this feature technically works, but I guess some of this is your companies secret, which is fine! I bet pieces of road are given a value given how many Strava users cycled on those roads (also visible in the "global heatmap"). A bunch of relatively short routes between point A and B are then compared based on the summed value of the pieces of road it uses. (I'm assuming it works this way!)

If I'm right, then I might have a nice suggestion. When I plan a long segment that crosses a couple of urban areas, sometimes it's much nicer to have a 10% longer route that actually goes around those urban areas (safer, more quiet, etc.). However, the "baseline popularity" of the roads in these urban areas will be relatively high; not because people like cycling there, but because they start and end their rides there. 

[Soren]

Hey @robbertmijn thanks so much for sharing your thoughts on routing. Currently, the popularity normalization for routing doesn't function on an absolute basis and factors in the surrounding area in the calculations, so when ticking off "follow most popular" during route creation, it does reflect a "relative" suggestion.