Planning a route with Strava Segments

Hi,

Is it possible to plan a route using Strava Segments? Possibly overlayed/adapted over a route you’ve previously done so you could add segments/areas onto a ride to explore new parts.

The Strava route builder is horrendous, or maybe I’m just using it wrong!!

I use trail forks.

Just go a ride, make every decent down and up a segment, unless it is already.

Makes no sense how Strava haven’t integrated segments and route planning together.
The planner only really follows roads, so is pointless for anything off-road based!

I’ve had a ‘make Strava Route Builder modular using linked segments’ request open with them for several years now… I think there is no chance of them doing this!

On the plus side you can use the Route Builder with the Heatmap (Global or Personal I think) and get the Route to snap-to-Heatmap – which is excellent when planning anything that uses any reasonably well-travelled segments off-road. The main thing you need to be careful of us placing each piont just close enough that the most popular route calculated does follow your segment and not some bizarre alternative using the local roads! Snap-to-Heatmap is the one feature that keeps me using Strava for MTB route planning.

The planner is fine and will follow off-road tracks and paths providing they are on the underlying map (OSM). Ensure that the “Use Popularity” slider is on. You can also display segments on the route planner map: on the left of the screen is a menu bar, the third icon down enables/disables the display of segments on the map.

I do this…

1, Wait for slack time at work – use segment explore on the area you want to visit.
2, This will bring up one or 2 well ridden segments. Choose one that looks promising (perhaps a climb up to the top of a hill).
3, Look at the leaderboard for this segment and open up some of the associated rides in new tabs. Generally speaking you don’t want anyone in the top 10% as these will likely be racing snakes who will be riding back down the same way they came up. Also you don’t want rides that happened in 2014 as they might be hitting trails that don’t exist anymore. Also try and go for rides that happened in a similar season to the one you hope to visit in.
4, Have a look at the profile pictures associated with the rides you have chosen. Are they wearing Lycra – if so delete. Do they look like power rangers – if so delete. Do they look like Salt of the earth, diamond geezer locals? If so these could be promising.
5, Have a look at the segments on these rides – do they have cool sounding names?
6, Pick a couple of promising looking rides. Strava doesn’t let you download GPX files directly but there is the mother of all loopholes. Press the spanner button on the ride and select create route. Save the route. Now you can download the GPX file from the route! NOTE: for some reason not all rides have the ‘create route’ option – but plenty do.
7, Upload the GPX file(s) to a mapping app you can actually follow – I use Viewranger with OS maps.
8, Go Exploring

I’ve had a ‘make Strava Route Builder modular using linked segments’ request open with them for several years now… I think there is no chance of them doing this!

On the plus side you can use the Route Builder with the Heatmap (Global or Personal I think) and get the Route to snap-to-Heatmap – which is excellent when planning anything that uses any reasonably well-travelled segments off-road. The main thing you need to be careful of us placing each piont just close enough that the most popular route calculated does follow your segment and not some bizarre alternative using the local roads! Snap-to-Heatmap is the one feature that keeps me using Strava for MTB route planning.

I can’t get it to snap to trails on the heatmap – it’ll snap to tracks that are marked on the map, but not to the heatmap. Am I misunderstanding what you mean?

Is snap-to-heatmap a premium/summit feature of the route builder? I’m a standard user and don’t see that option.

But … I’ve not had any major problems creating off-road routes that follow BWs or footpaths – any problems I do come across are because the underlying data is incorrect and there’s a gap in the legal status of the route. The only real difficulty comes when you properly go off-grid and have to resort to manual.

I’ve just created a route: turned on the segment display and most segments, presumably the ones following ROWs/tracks the route builder would follow. The one it didn’t is definitely cheeky and there isn’t even a footpath but it was easy to go to manual mode and do a quick approximation. I suppose being able to click on either end of a segment and have it route along it would be what’s needed but I think it’s doing the routing based on the underlying mapping.

so is pointless for anything off-road based!

Sums up Strava’s attitude towards off-road generally. Though as I’ve moved away from public sharing, leaderboards and caring much about segments, it’s less of a problem. I may be ready to bin Strava entirely, though want my ride log archive and gear info moved into whatever else I use (Garmin Connect possibly).

Is snap-to-heatmap a premium/summit feature of the route builder? I’m a standard user and don’t see that option.

I have summit and don’t have it either.

I have summit and don’t have it either.

Reading @bartimeus’s post again it may be that there are two “Route builder” pages: one accessible through the “My Routes” link and one through the “Heatmaps” link.

@ndthornton – you only get the option to download the GPX of/create route from activities of those people you follow.

you only get the option to download the GPX of/create route from activities of those people you follow.

That’s definately not the case. Iv done it lots

That’s definitely not the case. I’ve done it lots

Curious – I’ve never had that option for activities by people I don’t follow. The only user option I can think of that might restrict it would be the Activities privacy setting but if you select “Followers” then it doesn’t appear on leader boards so you wouldn’t be able to follow your process. Are you a premium/summit member?

Makes no sense how Strava haven’t integrated segments and route planning together.

True.

The planner only really follows roads, so is pointless for anything off-road based!

Wrong! See my posts above.

Curious – I’ve never had that option for activities by people I don’t follow. The only user option I can think of that might restrict it would be the Activities privacy setting but if you select “Followers” then it doesn’t appear on leader boards so you wouldn’t be able to follow your process. Are you a premium/summit member?

I am not a premium member, just standard. Maybe there is something weird with my account? I haven’t worked out the statistics but Id say roughly about 30 – 50% of rides I look at I am able to create the route for. I would guess its something to do with other peoples privacy settings. Have you tried a few different rides ?

I can’t find a second heat map route builder. I think it’ll follow tracks if they’re marked ont he base map, but singletrack never is, so it’s not really useful for MTB.

I’ve just had a play and I think that I’m just lucky that most of our local trails have been added to the OSM – so it is snapping to the OSM an not the Heatmap… but you can toggle to manual and plot on top of the Heatmap for the segments which aren’t on OSM. Not much use if most of your ride is not on OSM mapped trails.

@ndthornton – on those I’ve tried, maybe half a dozen, I’ve never had the option of downloading the GPX if I don’t follow the person. Could just be luck of the draw I suppose.

Edit: I went for a ride today so checked the Strava Flyby feature and went through the various riders’ activities, I don’t follow any of them, and I had the option to create a route on about 50%. Must be a setting somewhere or it’s a bug in Strava that lets rides slip through certain parts of the UI.

In my earlier post (from yesterday actually) I said I created a route – the only bit I had to do “manually” rather than let the builder route things for me was a segment that is neither a RoW nor a path/track on the ground (as far as I can tell from aerial imagery) so isn’t marked up on OSM. Strava tells me it’s had a hundred or so attempts so it’s likely that there’s some trace on the ground thus I don’t need to be millimetre accurate in how I plot the route at that point, so long as I can find the start of the descent I’m going to be able to follow it. Plotting that segment took all of 30 seconds in manual mode.

At some point you have to show some nous and work things out for yourself. It may not be “easy” but it’s doable.

I’m sure everyone knows how to use the manual button! The confusion was because someone said there was a snap to heatmap feature. Which there isn’t…

Good info!

Found a way that’s currently working.
Either by downloading gpx direct from rides I like the look of from local riders, or directly converting segments to individual gpx files for riders I can’t get a gpx route from.

Ridewithgps.com allows you to load multiple gpx files onto one map, and edit, trim, combine and add to paths in any way you fancy.