The night heatmaps just don’t seem useful.

Anywhere but the largest cities, there’s almost nothing to see. I live in a city of over 100,000 people but there’s almost nothing shown on the night heatmap: about half a dozen sections of road are highlighted, and they’re just the obvious routes from the city centre to the different residential areas – exactly the routes you’d pick if all you had was a map of the city. Presumably, these are the most “popular” routes because most rides after dark are just people commuting in winter. Looking around other UK cities of 100k-250k people, it’s the same picture in all of them.

Conversely, if you look at a major city like London, New York or Amsterdam, you just see that the major roads with cycle paths are highlighted, and the roads without cycle paths and the little residential side streets are not. In other words, exactly the roads that you’d expect to be most used at any time of day.

I genuinely can’t see a use-case for this. I can’t see any situation in which these heatmaps are giving information that would make me change a decision. In particular, there are so few routes highlighted that one can only conclude that a route not being highlighted just means “no information available” rather than “people actively decide not to go here after dark”.

​@mal Shouldn’t you test this feature before making announcements? As ​@dricherby said, night heatmaps are mostly completely empty and I’m using the ride activity type. No way this is for one year, it doesn’t even reflect a single rainy night.