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Up until now I have been using Trailforx which is great.
I am told however that locally there are many more trails detailed under Strava.
When I went to download Strava however, there appears to be a number of cycling options. Can anyone advise which one is best?
Thanks
Craig
Strava is just unfiltered ride uploads and segments, head to the segment explorer and have a look locally
The free one...as mikesmith says, you then use Segment Explorer and find the routes.
The heat map in the route planner is more useful than the segment explorer I think since it show what people actually ride even it hasn’t been made into a segment.
What area on trailforks are you talking about Craig?
Trailforks data is mainly fed from Strava, however in some areas the trails are curated by trail pixies, land managers, local clubs, etc. Areas or trails can be blocked out if particularly sensitive (a good thing).
Some places with popular trails, Strava has dozens of segments for the same trail, but Trailforks may be filtered to one or two.
Trailforks has nice ability to report on trail conditions and features or issues. Strava is just about KOMs.
Segment explorer in Strava is garbage. I don't really know how it filters things but it only shows a fraction of the segments that Strava has.
As for "which Strava", if you refer to the paid packages... free. Until Strava acknowledge mountain biking as an activity and split segments so roads near an MTB segment aren't populated with roadies and vice versa.
Unless you don't care about leaderboards (like me), then it doesn't really matter so much, except you can still see segments you didn't ride on your activity due to matching a road or MTB segment. It also makes challenges and club leaderboards pretty irrelevant unless you know everyone else on there did the same type of riding.
you can also browse strava segments on the trailforks map. Select your riding area then on the overview select the layers tab. Click on strava. The segments usually become visible at zoom level 14 and higher. you can see the zoom level in the header bar of your browser. for example. (z=14 is the zoom level)
https://www.trailforks.com/region/torwood/?lat=56.039663&lon=-3.862596&z=14&m=trailforks
the strava segments are highlighted in orange.
If your area is lacking trail data on trailforks, try clicking on the ridelogs tab. you will be able to see which routes people are riding.
Have a look at the Strava Labs Global Heatmap. This gives an unfiltered view of where Strava-ists are riding, just zoom in on the area you are interested in. I've discovered several trails using this method that don't show up as segments on Strava or trails on Trailforks.
There's also the interactive ride finder tool on Trailforks.
https://www.trailforks.com/ridelog/finder/?rid=3113
Find the area you are interested in on the map then click search. this will bring up a list of ridelogs in the area that you are looking at.