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Has anyone else noticed that the Strava route builder has got worse at taking you the wrong way up one way roads, and trails since the subscription model change?
It was never perfect before, but it would generally avoid most one way streets. I had to detour around several of them on last weekend's road ride, and I noticed whilst route planning last night that it's taking me up some of the most popular trails in the Surrey Hills. You can even see it going to wrong way round roundabouts.
It's almost like they've lost all concept of direction, and are basing the route off pure popularity.
One of the main reasons I justified paying for the subscription was how often I use the route building feature, but you can't completely trust it anymore in areas you don't know.
For balance: They did finally add the ability to import gpx files. Although I think that might have tweaked a route I imported from Trailforks instead of leaving it exactly as plotted.
I use it all the time. However I've not noticed it taking me up one-ways the wrong way. I suspect you are making your waypoints too far apart if it is going up trails you want to go down. If it's a trail then it's not a legal one-way and won't be on the map - so how is it supposed to know? I've not seen it do anything weird on roundabouts either - are you sure you haven't passed through any mirrors lately?
Works really well for me, good routes and no silliness in them.
Mobile or PC?
They work differently
Been amazingly better for me, the integration of the heatmap makes it so so much better for mtbing. I would say a lot of the plotting needs to be done by eye with switches to manual mode etc. I love it though
Used it a few times and found is iffy if I need a plan a route (mainly for gravel rides) I use Komoot or ride with gps as they are so much better. Route feature feels like a bit of an after thought addition for Strava.
Yeah actually noticed this today, tried to take me the wrong way round Leatherhead one-way system.
It's just using heatmap data isn't it? I suspect that doesn't have directional information in it, so I'm not sure I would expect it to know about one way systems and what direction a trail is usually ridden.
Have found the route builder occasionally gets overwhelmed, but in fairness I've been plotting some fairly complex routes with lots of waypoints clustered in a small area. Overall still find it excellent but it needs a careful hand, preferably with google streetview and/or geograph.org.uk open in a separate tab!
Overall Strava experience has gotten slightly glitchier since we started paying though... 🙄
I’ve been trying to explain to Strava for a while that they have an incredible asset available to them in planning and that’s all the activities that have already been recorded. I think the current state is that they’ve added the heatmap to the base map but not yet got to the point of proposing routes based on the weight of prior activities between those points.
The risk is that it could become self referential but it would have to go through a state of being usable to get to that point...
Isn't that exactly what popularity based routing is?
If you plot two points you can either select the most direct route or most popular route.
For me it's pretty much the best route plotter out there now.
I hate Komoot, it's glitchy as hell for me but then it's more designed to work in connection with the app and a paired GPS device. RWGPS is OK but IME the downloaded route files are prone to causing crashes (maybe that's just my Garmin?) but Strava routes have never crashed it.
It does need some work occasionally, there are bits where it thinks that a road is closed or where it'll try to route you on a trail rather than a road or vice versa (a particular problem when you're doing a road ride past a trail centre - click on one side of (say) Gisburn and again on the other and it'll route you round the Red rather than along the road!)
But yeah, for me, it's the first port of call on any route planning.
Yeah actually noticed this today, tried to take me the wrong way round Leatherhead one-way system.
Ah close, it was one way streets in Epsom heading towards Leatherhead where I first noticed it actually.
I've just been trying to look through my old routes to confirm it hasn't always done this, but I had a clearout just a few days ago so don't have many old routes left. And I rarely plot mtb routes for trails I know, so I haven't got anything covering this specific example.
I thought there was a directional element to the popularity algorithm, but it sounds like there might never have been. They've got all the information, so it would be possible.
And for context: the trail it was routing me up was Yoghurt Pots on Holmbury Hill - which has been ridden 141,000 times! (It did the same for Telegraph road too). In 10 years of riding it I've never seen anybody going the other way (but there is nothing preventing you doing so, if you were determined).
I feel that this is a little bit like vehicle sat-nav - if you expect the routing algorithm to do all of the work, then you are going to come unstuck at some point, as there will always be little flaws in the data, that lead to the kind of scenarios described above.
The longer the distance between waypoints, the great the scope for it doing something you wouldn't necessarily expect.
It depends on what you expect from the tool, I suppose, but I rather enjoy the whole planning process and use a combination of Google maps, Google Street View, Streetmap.co.uk, Strava route builder and Garmin BaseCamp to cross reference where the roads/Bridleways are, where awkward junctions are, which side of the road cycle paths are, etc.
Ultimately,Strava route builder is used to record/generate the GPX which ends up on my Garmin.
The other reason for using Strava routebuilder is the integration with veloviewer.com, to aid in tile hunting