Comment by Moral_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Moral_ | Hacker News Reader

I use Strava all the time. As a cat 1 racer it makes it fun to set KOMs and "race" against the elite in the state. That being said I think Strava needs to have a way to limit the Downhill segments. Some downhill segments where I live, utah, are outrageous with top speeds of 70mph. While I'm a Strong advocate for the segments I wish people would stop making downhill segments as they're far too dangerous. If I ever do a climb then a descent and see a segment that is way too dangerous I always flag it. The problem is, people can continue to re make the segment so no matter how many times me or my team mates flag the DH segment it continues to come back.

Strava can't take all the blame, its really up to riders to not ride out of their level, on a public road. You're not in the tour de France, you're on some public road.

While I talk down upon the DH segments its because I got lucky. While riding in Colorado I decided to go hard down a climb like I was the lead in the tour de france, I didn't know the descent what so ever. I came around a corner and it got much tighter than I had expected I went into oncoming traffic and had to bail into a ditch, destroying my bike and nearly killing myself. After that I realized it's not worth being a hero on the descent.

>That being said I think Strava needs to have a way to limit the Downhill segments

how about just taking a bit of personal responsibility? if a downhill segment is too dangerous, don't do it. blaming an app when you crash is one of the stupidest things i've ever heard of. I don't see how strava has any responsibility to do anything.

Not a Strava user - but the mention of 70mph winning speeds, makes me think that Strava should eliminate segments from their database where in order to win you need to violate the speed limit. As a baseline they should not be encouraging people to break the law.

It's not just the user of the program that should be taking personal responsibility, but the coders as well.

How does Strava know what the speedlimit it?

From memory, Strava's most popular markets are the US, the UK, Australia, Japan, France, Italy.

Speed limits vary widely across jurisdictions and change frequently.

IMHO the best thing to do would be to remove the leaderboard from segments over (say) 3% negative gradient.

(For non-Strava users, Strava does have segments where no leaderboard of the fastest users is shown, but your own times are shown.)

You could start with this map: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_limits_in_the_United_Stat...

It doesn't need to be precise - it just shouldn't encourage reckless, illegal behaviour.

For the sake of argument, imagine they did calculate the (average??) speed limit for each downhill segment.

Then what?

They hide anyone who goes over that speed from the leaderboard, so the leaderboard is full of people who managed to average precisely the speed limit?

Or as soon as someone goes over the average they hide the whole leaderboard like they do for flagged segments now?

My proposal is that they should hide the leaderboard for all segments over (say) 3% average negative gradient. Simple physics predicts that -3% gradient will put you over the speed limit in most jurisdictions, and it's much simpler to work out.

I’d assume they’d do what you suggest they already do sometimes - make the segment without a leaderboard. Just show your times.

I like your suggestion better than mine. But it seems that Stava is trying to shirk as much responsibility as possible, and as such your suggestion seems less likely to get implemented.

My proposal doesn’t involve them doing anything good - it just has them no longer encouraging blatantly illegal behavior. It’s a minimum bar that should be code-able in minimum time. Almost all of the dangerous segments would still have leaderboards - only the blatantly illegal ones wouldn’t be and they could say that they "do not encourage illegal behavior" - something they can’t honestly say now.

Disagree. Lots of roads have a 25mph speed limit and it's trivial to exceed that on a bike.

Percent grade might be a better indicator.

Why flag it? We have flagging problems locally (one individual) on segments that are in no way dangerous. Dangerous for you may not be dangerous for someone else. Just because the segment is there, it doesn't mean everyone has to go for it.

> Dangerous for you may not be dangerous for someone else

He said in his comment that he's a cat 1 racer. I'm willing to bet if something's unsafe for him, it'd be unsafe for any strava user.

Not knocking him, but we have non-pro locals who are better descenders than Cat 1. Not everyone is an awesome descender. Also, who's to say an 18% descent segment is any less dangerous than a 3% descent being ridden by beginners going after a segment?

Also, who's to say an 18% descent segment is any less dangerous than a 3% descent being ridden by beginners going after a segment?

Isaac Newton.

(In his second law.) Don't misunderstand me: I think 3% descents are dangerous too. But the increased speed an 18% descent gives is more dangerous than a crash at lower speed.

Also, being an "awesome descender" doesn't make you safe - in some cases it means you just crash at higher speeds. Vincenzo Nibali is possibly the best (road) descender in the world at the moment (eg 2013 Giro exploits, his attack on the 2012 Milan-San Remo Poggio descent) and yet he crashed in the World Championship road race, and it was only luck that saved him from serious injury.

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