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.
This function and nothing is the same.
Where I live, most activities happen at night and nothing is shown.
@mal - How does Strava determine what “night” is? That may be the biggest issue. Despite riding after work most of the week, I almost never see anything that is auto-labeled as “night ride” or “night run”. The best I get is evening and often it shows “afternoon” even after work and in the dark. Here in Alaska, where I live gets dark around 4:00pm in the middle of winter. Your post makes it sound like it is classifying things after dark as “night” with regards to the heatmap, but that clearly is not the case.
It would be really helpful to hear from Strava on what the conditions are.
The time frame is one of them, but as others have pointed out, it's unclear what's considered to be “night”. It seems that the “Night activity]” is the probable answer - that would mean that it's any activity starting past 9pm, regardless of the actual daylight/sunset.
Another factor seems to be the frequency of activities. In my area, there are disconnects on the night map at crossroads / path forks - so it's likely something like “30 night runners will get this segment shine in the night heatmap, but if they split paths and run 3 different directions in groups of 10, it won't be enough for highlighting each of those three different streets."
And maybe there's yet some more.
In general, the idea behind night heatmaps is great, but the implementation needs some fine tuning, so that it's actually reliable and useful.
The sunset and sunrise data for any geo coordinates are easy available and Strava’s default activity names with “Night Ride” or “Night run” are correct through the saisons, therefore I don’t think it’s a definition problem what “night” entails. Of course I can be wrong and only activities in example after midnight are eligible but that would too dumb to be true. As @Jana_S suspects so do I - they only show something when a minimum number of activities happened. For my 2 cents this miminum needs not only finetuning, it needs a complete overhaul. But as long Strava advertises with subscriber features they can’t deliver and doesn’t deign to explain anything we can only guess.
