What you Need to Know About Strava Routes

A few of the latest upgrades to Strava

After establishing your starting point, Routes creates a loop by considering other waypoints that meet the criteria of the selected preferences for distance, elevation, surface type and popularity.

What’s New

Social ride tracking app Strava, revamped their route builder for a streamlined mobile experience. Previously only available on the website, Routes has been updated specifically for the Strava mobile app, you can find Routes on the Explore page.

Suggested Routes

Strava dove into its database of over 3 billion activities from 50 million athletes to offer one of the most robust route builders in the world. They collected the same data used in Strava’s Heatmaps to select popular routes to better plan rides and runs around athletes, not cars.

Routes can be filtered by activity type, distance, elevation preference and surface preference. This means you can select a hilly road ride that’s about 15 miles long or a flat 60-mile ride that’s focused on gravel and dirt roads. The route builder is set to start at your current location but nearly anywhere can be selected as a starting point.

This visualization shows a view of “heat” from popular roads near a given waypoint that’s being considered by Routes. Popularity/heat is one of the considerations for choosing a Route’s next waypoint, along with the selected preferences for distance, elevation and surface type.

This opens up many routes for people that are in an unfamiliar location or even at home. Suggested Routes has already shown us here at RBA a few new fire road connections to spice things up on our normal rides. While we are traveling, we now have a bit more confidence to find good rides and trails on routes that the locals ride.

Draw a Route

If you have a destination in mind (or not), the “Draw your own route” feature makes picking the roads to get there simple. The “Draw your own route” tab is located at the bottom of the Routes page. Once you select “Draw your own route” a map of your current location will expand, you can then use your finger to draw your desired course. Strava routing algorithms will match your line to the nearest roads and trails then will select a route based on proximity and popularity. “Draw your own route” is one of the easiest route building experiences we have had. The ability to complete the process quickly from a phone without any major glitches and irregularities make it a favorite.

Route Analysis

Strava has updated its route analysis feature to include surface type on the map. Only elevation and distance data were displayed before the update, now the map differentiates surface types in two shades of red, paved and unpaved surfaces are now distinguished.

How to get it

Strava Routes is available to Strava Summit subscribers, routes created by Summit users can be shared with anyone however “Suggested Routes” and “Draw your own route” can only be created through the Strava mobile app. Routes brings a necessary feature to Summit which makes it more inviting to enthusiast and competitive cyclists. Strava Summit is available for $8 a month or a $60 once a year payment.

Find out more at www.strava.com