Feedback: recent update to heatmaps makes creating routes difficult

[robpmcadam]

UPDATE FROM STRAVA:

Thanks so much for writing in and providing this feedback. This is something that we are aware of and currently looking into. We're actively working on solving this gap in user experience and weighing this feedback into consideration as we work on an update. We appreciate your time and patience.

a recent feature seems to have filtered heatmaps based on the sport type when routing. i suspect that this is broadly a great feature, but it has now made gravel routing very difficult because of the data sparsity (a large % of people don't select "gravel ride" on their activities, most rides aren't gravel anyways, etc.). plus there's so much overlap in gravel and road routes anyways, so aggregating that data makes sense imo.

the road heatmaps work great here, but the only way to get them to show up is to change the sport type to road cycling, which affects the routing. I prefer to use "gravel ride" as the sport to get good autorouting ("prefer dirt" has its issues since it always wants to send me on hiking trails instead of just doing the logical thing..). most of the heatmaps around me are pretty much empty for gravel routing, so my workaround was to switch between sports when routing so I can view the heat map, but this became a pretty crappy workstream to make routes. im having to move to ridewithgps until this gets cleaned up. im pretty bummed too, because ive generally preferred Strava for routing, and I now have to learn a new workstream for the time being.

my suggestion would be to allow users to toggle data for the heatmaps (eg I can show an aggregated heat map of road, gravel, mtb activities) when routing.

[mmkko]

There simply is not enough rides marked as gravel rides, not all set the ride type in their device or in Strava afterwards. You should at least have an option to select multiple ride types, like you do in the separate map page (which I have no clue what it is there for). So the heatmap shows nothing for gravel. Also the surface type option is of no use for gravel riding. At least around here it takes you to mountain bike trails regardless of difficulty so you have to manually check every bit of your route if you want to ride instead of push your bike. Just cancelled my subscription because of this. Frustrated with the constant changes for the worse.

[Jane]

Hello @robpmcadam 

Thanks for providing this feedback. I'll ask our Team to review your comments.

In the meantime, for best results, please ensure you've selected "prefer dirt surfaces" under routing preferences when planning a gravel ride:

 

[robpmcadam]

thanks Jane!

and re prefer dirt surfaces: my experience here is that generally 1) it puts me on a bunch of non-rideable hiking trails 2) makes silly routing decisions like eg instead of going 1 mi on pavement, it will go 5 miles out of the way on dirt. selecting "gravel ride" instead tends to give more of the desired behavior of routing on dirt roads that are commonly ridden while connecting things with pavement as needed.

[robpmcadam]

for example, here is what the heatmap looks like for a very popular gravel segment in our area, mt riga road