I concur - I've had a similar experience in Pittsburgh (fortunately, I drove the route first, as I was skeptical of some of the roads, and decided it was not a route I would ride a bike on).  What I find interesting though, is that you can create your own route, and mark it with public visibility - yet, I can't find any place to search for "human generated" routes, that I would have some confidence that somebody created.  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.  This seems like it would be a great feature - to have a searchable set of routes, created by other Strava athletes, and then they could be 'rated' by others that try them (and perhaps comment), so people would know of any issues on the route [hmm... prepares to hop over and suggest that feature] << be sure to vote for it - safety for all!!

Wonderful suggestion. But I must say, I’m much mood impressed that, as a cat, you can both drive *and ride a bicycle!

Judging by the cycling heatmaps around Van Dorn, it looks like quite a few riders are cutting over to Oakwood Rd to avoid that sketchy section at the on/off ramp for I-495.  Sometimes you have to fiddle with the options between "most popular" and "most direct", and even then you run the risk of generating a treacherous route.  I’ve found that the route algorithm doesn’t really know the meaning of “safe” because it’s not actually riding/running these areas, but, it can be taught.  If you use OpenStreetMaps (OSM) to mark various streets/roads/paths as open to pedestrians, bikes, or cars-only, when OSM pushes map database updates to STRAVA, routing will take those into account.  Granted this isn’t an immediate process, but it’s a more hands-on approach to improving the system.  I’ve been making OSM tweaks over the last year or so to the areas here around Virginia Beach and have seen some improvements in STRAVA routing.  Hope this was helpful.  Safe riding!

Openstreetmap is the source for the Basemap and routing. The tags for roads include whether pedestrians and cycles (etc) can use the way.  If cycling / walking / running is forbidden (like UK motorways) this can be recorded (map error reporting on Strava also works via mapping enthusiasts) and Strava won’t route along roads tagged cycling=no.

Trickier if access is permitted and safety might be choice: I try hard to avoid cycling on most dual carriageways where I see lots of braver cyclists, but “most popular” routing often avoids busy roads where cycling is permitted, but less popular.

This issue still exists. A few days ago Strava created a route for me that placed me on Interstate 80 in Truckee, CA for several miles! It's illegal to bike on i-80.

There are countless times that I've built routes using the routing feature (with the popularity heatmap) and then I get to the real place, only to discover that that trail is permanently blocked/closed/private. It would be great to be able to flag trails on the fly (just like Apple or Google Maps) and then if a trail gets enough flags, it would be removed from the database.