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Minimum Segment Length.... on Zwift (and other virtual cycling platforms)

eschlange
Shkhara

Strava recently increased their minimum segment length to 500 meters, from the 300 meter mark where it's been for several  years.

As the person maintaining the library of Strava segments for Zwift, I find this new requirement to be overly restrictive. 300 meters was already too long, in fact. 500 meters is just silly.

Most Zwift sprints are too short to be made into Strava segments, and certain sections of the Alpe du Zwift climb are also too short.

I understand that Strava engineers are concerned with the inconsistent recording of GPS coordinates on various devices, but this isn't an issue on virtual platforms where coordinates are consistently written to your fit file data. (Zwift records every 1s, for example.)

For that reason alone, shorter segments should be allowed on virtual platforms, since accuracy is ensured across all users.

There are quite a few other reasons why I believe the 500-meter requirement is silly, and I've detailed those in this post: https://zwiftinsider.com/strava-minimum-segment-length/

I do hope Strava will reconsider this new limit.

10 REPLIES 10

cinameng
Mt. Kenya

The increase to 500m has all but made segments unusable. I’ve had to revert to using the Garmin app for short segments now but it’s no way near as effective.