Edited Date/Time
1/29/2018 12:47pm
Western/Central Europe is on fire and Greenland looks like a nice place if you want to be outdoors and alone!
I don't use Strava, but this data is so fascinating. As you'll read (or not) in the PR below, this is data from everyone using Strava - 1 BILLION activities from 10 MILLION people - 31 different disciplines like kiteboarders or backcountry skiers, not just hikers and cyclists.
Strava bills this as "Strava Community Creates Ultimate Map of Athlete Playgrounds". While this is true, I'm sure we're all aware of the potential risk to sensitive or even illegal "playgrounds" being discovered and it feels like a sense of adventure is lost if relying on this data to perfectly pin-point a trail I've never ridden. I guess I'm old.
Live interactive heatmap here - https://labs.strava.com/heatmap
Their official PR
London, UK - 1st November 2017 - Strava, the social network for athletes, unveils their Global Heatmap, an interactive data visualisation featuring more than 1 billion activities from Strava athletes across the globe. The map boasts six times more data than the original version in 2015, and incorporates a wide variety of year-round land and water activities. Created in conjunction with Strava Metro, Strava’s heatmap is a data visualisation tool that provides a broad look at activities, popular routes and sport destinations around the world.
The Strava community has generated more than two-hundred thousand years’ worth of activity that cover nearly 17 billion miles. Visit the new Strava Global Heatmap here and see activities from any location on the planet. Learn more about Strava Metro here.
The Strava Global Heatmap is the biggest and richest publicly available dataset of its kind and consists of:
Over 1 billion activities from over 10 million athletes
3 trillion latitude/longitude points
10 terabytes of raw input data
A total distance of 27 billion km (17 billion miles)
A total duration of 200 thousand years
12 trillion pixels rasterized
5% of all land on Earth covered
“A global community can seem very abstract until you see its activities visually represented in your immediate location and across the world,” says Strava CEO James Quarles. “It’s not just runners and cyclists, either – skiers, hikers, kiteboarders and even mountaineers on Everest are all counted in the more than 1 billion uploads of the Strava community.”
The heatmap features data from 31 different activity types, spanning everything from kayaking to backcountry skiing. Strava Premium athletes can also access personal heatmaps, a unique way to visualise their activities over time. It shows everything from swims across the English channel to hikes on iconic trails in Patagonia to snowboarding in Japan. It’s also a tool that Strava athletes explore to find new places to play.
This window into the world of human movement is taken a step further with Strava Metro, a tool that helps make riding, running and walking in cities better. Strava Metro anonymises and aggregates data from the millions of activities shared on Strava each week, and then partners from departments of transportation and city planning groups use to improve infrastructure for cyclists and pedestrians. A full set of Metro data enables deep analysis of activities such as popular or avoided routes, peak commute times, intersection wait times, and origin/destination zones.
"The Strava Heatmap is enlightening because it lets us connect the bike riders we spot on the streets with a broader perspective of our territory, over space and time,” says Jorge G. Coelho, Mobility Project Manager, AMAL, Portugal. “Strava Metro then gives us the possibility to dive much deeper, breaking down data minute-by-minute and segment-by-segment for the entire road network. It's a bit like our Pasteis de Belém: they're good to smell, but you have to really sink your teeth into them to fully take advantage."
Download Strava for iOS or Android and upgrade to Strava Premium to access advanced features. To learn more about Strava, visit www.strava.com.
About Strava
Strava is the social network for athletes. Our mobile apps and website connect millions of active people every day. All athletes belong on Strava, no matter where they live, which sport they love or what device they use. Join the community at strava.com.
Our favourite stats:
16 activities uploaded every second, 11 million every week
100+ compatible mobile phones and GPS devices
140+ employees, most in San Francisco with more in Hanover and Bristol
1,100+ professional athletes are on Strava
1 million athletes join every 40 days
1.3 billion kudos given between athletes last year
£5.99 a month to make the most of your sport with Premium, or £44.99 a year
100+ cities making commuting better with Strava Metro
About Strava Metro
Strava Metro makes riding, running and walking in cities better. Metro anonymies and aggregates the millions of human-powered activities uploaded to Strava every week, then partners with departments of transportation, city planners and engineering firms to improve infrastructure for cyclists and pedestrians. http://metro.strava.com
[Big fan of Strava, keeps my routine rides interesting]
I'm curious if that heatmap includes rides that were marked as private. If the trail builder is good about enforcing a no-strava rule on secret trails when riding it with friends, or at least a no-public strava rule, then it shouldn't be an issue. Same for riding trails that technically aren't open to bikes (ex USFS lands). You'd be a fool to publicly post those.
Having recently moved completely across the country to a new area, tools like Strava's and TrailFork's heatmap have been a great to find popular routes around established riding destinations, although in this day and age those are all too often the paved dirt sidewalks. I mean "Flow Trails".
Strava does have anomalies within it's structure, for my initial usage (much like the beer and weed I so love with all of my insides) anything I'd choose to have kept private stayed private. Is it on this Global Heatmap making you paranoid sspomer?
Could care less - it's not there to be intrusive or to hold other individual users accountable for their actions - again - that'd have to be left to how responsible that individual would be.
Don't be putting the cart infront the horse.
I contacted them about removing the trails from the heat map and they said it wasn't possible.
I was under the impression that they worked with land owners and managers to remove any illegal or private trails from their maps.
By far the worst part of strava is that you cannot see who put your trail on or that you don't have any reliable tool to report/remove routes other people put up (what I meant is when somebody put on your new trail)
Whats also interesting are the number of lines on railroad tracks. People are either turning on Strava on the commuter train or hiking on the live tracks.
And people using it on golf courses haha.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/28/fitness-tracking-app-give…
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