Global heatmap of cycling and running routes | Hacker News Reader

Global heatmap of cycling and running routes

labs.strava.com

258 pointsknappe139 comments

Map creator here if you have questions.

The data is aggregated into a quad tree based on number of GPS points in each pixel. Tiles are then served on the fly using Go and C using CGO.

Cloudfront tackles most of the load, but the load balanced i2.xlarge instances can do about 300 tiles a second.

Geographic search, and click through to routes.. and this will be a really big deal. Love the concept, keep it coming!

agreed. i'd love to be able to see what routes people run near my home so i can get new ideas.

How do you calculate exacly the coloring of the heat map? Is the scaling of it locally adjusted or is it a global/absolute scale?

Each pixel has a count. Each tile gets a 90 percentile value. Every corner gets the average of its 4 tiles. Every pixel in the currently requested tile gets a value [0, 1] based on the bi-linearly interpolated "max". It's then colored based on that final value.

Maybe unnecessarily complicated, but it does provide really good local normalization. You also get cool looking shading like in this location http://labs.strava.com/heatmap/#16/-121.76487/38.49134/gray/...

This is very interesting. thanks! I would love to know about the whole setup in detail. nudge

(edit: Your color scales are not really intuitive, I have no idea what red or blue means or red vs green.)

It looks like it's losing a lot of dynamic range when you zoom in to a specific road and it's all completely pink (or whatever the hottest color is depending on the chosen theme).

Enjoyed the heatmap when it was on raceshape and like it here as well!

Is this now the complete dataset from strava Run/Bike activities?

It has every public ride and run with activity id < 120,000,000

It's not updated on every upload, but pretty much the complete dataset.

Looks like id's went above 120m in early march. Does that mean activities after that aren't included?

Does it include premium account users' data?

This map is cool, but it doesnt help me use it for what I imagine is a pretty common use-case, finding a popular route from Place A to B. Would it be possible to drop placemarkers between two places and do routing based on Strava popularity? Right now Google bike directions are pretty bad where I live, and it would be nice to know what route the "insiders" are taking to do a popular route (MIT to Concord is one Im thinking of, but I can imagine other alternatives)

You'd probably be interested in this feature, which does exactly what you're asking for:

http://www.strava.com/routes

Great map! Fantastic work. Two questions/points:

- Where's the source data from?

- You should think about producing an overlay with bike and run in different colours to see where these differ.

The data is from http://www.strava.com

An overlay would be nice, but there is a version for both running and riding.

Is this something you are going to release for people to include in mashups? I'd love to get it in hillmap.com

Also how accurate is the bike vs run stuff? I'm seeing a a surprising amount of people biking activity in wilderness areas.

why are you serving on the fly? Are we seeing live data?

Would Strava be OK with people using this data to trace paths for Open Street Map?

I noticed there are quite a few paths through Golden Gate Park in SF (as just one of many examples) that are pretty clear running/biking paths that are not in any of the typical basemap providers' maps and not currently in OSM. If you reached out to the OSM community and gave the go ahead, this would be a great way to improve the trail data in OSM.

We have a self-hosted version of the iD editor that already includes this data as a tracing layer. http://strava.github.io/iD/#background=Bing&map=16.97/-122.5...

I've also built another tool, Slide, to help use this data for faster editing, see http://labs.strava.com/slide/

I'm amazed that there hasn't been more conversation about this - kudos to both you and Strava for this. These tools and this data set seem to have huge potential for crowd-sourced mapping.

Better still if it could be released an an official layer for Open Street Map. Any chance of that happening given the licensing conditions of the various data sets?

Unlike a traced layer, the heatmap is self-updating and objective, so I think has a value of its own.

Per my other comment -- can you do a version which show avg speed of the route goers? It would be awesome to see the fastest path via bike or run between points... if you noted each stop the people made, it could be the diff between a smooth, fun ride vs a stop-heavy route.

Why Google Maps and not OpenStreetMap as the base layer?

The overlay tiles zoom weird in leaflet. They get treated like a base layer so when you zoom, they get scaled 2x and the new tiles load on top. That doesn't look right when the tiles are transparent. There must be an option to fix this but couldn't find it.

I couldn't get the styles I wanted with mapbox so I just defaulted to google.

Thank you for this map! Two questions: - what implementation of quadtree are you using? - will you ever consider opening the data for download as shapefiles/any other vector format? Thanks again, great job!

My own quad tree, they're not that hard to write :)

We're not considering opening the data. But we are working with cities to help improve their bike infrastructure

http://bikeportland.org/2014/05/01/odot-embarks-on-big-data-...

In line with http://xkcd.com/1138/, i'd request this map be adjusted by the population density in the mapped areas, so be to be able to get more data than "a lot of people live here" and "a lot of Strava users live here".

If you look at connections between medium to small sized cities though, often in google maps, even with street view, something seems like it'd be a totally fine route. This takes that, and when paired up with the frequency people tend to feel comfortable riding at speed on them to track, can show you out of ten various routes, which is the best to take. Zoom level :)

it's not so useful for seeing what regions have the most active people, but it is still useful if you zoom in on any city to see where the trails are. even in the most populous regions, there's lots of good info to be had on this map.

This criticism only applies when zoomed out. It provides a lot more information than "where the people are" when sufficiently zoomed in on a specific location.

Why does that make sense in this case? People probably don't care how many bike paths there are in an area per capita. They would just want to know how many bike paths there are and where they are.

I'd certainly like more specific data, but if you're a resident of the area you're examining, this is definitely revealing on its own.

Look at the dutch/german border, it's clearly not a population map if market penetration/usage is not homogenous.

http://labs.strava.com/heatmap/#8/6.26125/52.11946/gray/both

Especially there is no gap between the Ruhr area and the Netherlands

http://imgur.com/SLF6dIM Source: http://www.ivie.es/es/actividades/noticias/2012/ws_res01.php

I was puzzled by that abrupt change at the border as well. It could be market penetration. Maybe bike infrastructure like the bike knooppuntnetwerk plays a role as well. http://www.nederlandfietsland.nl/knooppuntroutes/overzicht-k... Although dedicated bike lanes fall of much more gradually at the border f.i. https://www.google.de/maps/@51.6623341,6.998291,9z/data=!5m1... As a Dutchman I never realised how unique this dense network of dedicated bike lanes and route signs is. Until I met some Canadian bike head expats who couldn't stop raving about it. It seems that if you're into touring on bike and getting around by bike the Low Countries are without equal.

As I'm living and cyling here [0] most of the year, my impression is: It's a mix of things.

  * In Germany cyclists are not treated well on streets [1]

  * The nature is much more beautiful in NL/Belgium/Luxemburg [2]

  * It is population density and "hilliness", too. I.e. there are
    more people using a bike, when it's flatter, imho.

  * The infrastructure and law in Netherlands and Belgium are much
    much more cycling friendly.

  * The culture in Netherlands and Belgium is much more outdoor
    sports friendly, thus the average person and car driver
    treats you better. Guess where all the "classics" of road
    cycling are?

[0]: http://labs.strava.com/heatmap/#8/6.26125/52.11946/gray/both

[1]: Mainly due to the focus of the media (ARD, ZDF) on the doping problem, using road cycling as a scapegoat and the sacred car culture in Germany. Each time, I'm training on German roads, my life gets threatened at least once since 2006. Thus I train in Netherlands and Belgium for 99,9% of my time.

[2]: Especially in the link provided by mxfh in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7688974

You mean competitive sports cycling. Everyday commute or leisure cycling is awesome in Germany. (Well, I often get aggressively almost run over by ruthless sports cyclists who treat every way as their highspeed training center every now and then...)

Good point. I know many fellows, who forget that they are moving way faster than expected and it's the competitive cyclist to blame. Oddly enough, I know a few groups who basically race in the traffic; However, the ones I know, reside in Netherlands. Most of the time, when I see conflicts between cyclists and cyclists or pedestrians it is due to bad design (of the pathways of each of one). In Germany often simply a few red stones in the sideway are defined as cycling path. Recently, cyclist traffic gets detached from the sideway and placed on the road. What is good and basically copied over from Netherlands and Belgium. A downer at this point is, that the state doesn't change the width of already existing roads, though it would be possible sometimes. Thus cars constantly are driving on this "cycling lane" or simply forget it is there.

Basically, I'm speaking of (road)cycling and cyclo-cross. Not necessarily competitive. Considering commuting it gets better, as nature and sustainability is more in political focus these days. However, it is _really_ far away from the infrastructure you see in Netherlands and Belgium.

But it is also depending upon what you compare here. So, considering a global view, I guess that Germany is way over the top. Considering good design, Netherlands and Belgium have my wholehearted appreciation. Netherlands even much more than Belgium.

On a side-note: I do not believe Strava neither has much commuter nor too much "leisure" data, imho, most of them are somewhat ambitious.

There is some information to be gained at a high level. For instance, in China you see that only Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong have high concentration, so this indicates the most international cities in China.

You can see how much Google skews their map for China, such as by looking at Beijing: http://labs.strava.com/heatmap/#15/116.46747/39.94133/gray/b...

Vs a similar map for Tokyo: http://labs.strava.com/heatmap/#15/-220.36217/35.60747/gray/...

I don't get it. What am I looking for?

The paths ridden do not line up with the actual roads. I am not sure what the OP is actually trying to tell us about that though.

There seems to be a chinese decree that all maps must be skewed so that in the case of being attacked, an attacker can presumably not find its way around the chinese capital.

Bike maps are likely created directly from GPS paths, which are unskewed. When you look at Bejing, you can easily see that difference.

Exactly, similar to that thing in the US before they opened up civilian GPS accuracy...

Not quite, the difference between the two situations is the difference between accuracy and precision.

E.g. http://academics.wellesley.edu/Chemistry/Chem105manual/Appen...

The Chinese Street maps are very precise but consitently inaccurate (the skew). The GPS tracks shown are relatively precise and accurate.

The change to the GPS signals (by not encrypting as much of the timestamp data) improved precision.

It is unclear to me whether Google is skewing or Strava. I would tend to assume the latter, but I'm a little biased in that regard.

Zoom into Beijing in Google Maps; switch between the default and satellite view and you'll see that they don't line up.

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/maps/ambcCIPTQi... says that the satellite images are correct and that the street maps are misaligned.

I've built map applications while based in Beijing. Google is definitely skewed here, by decree of the Chinese government. The interesting thing is that the skew is different for various regions in China, but it hasn't changed for years. If you correct for the offset in Beijing, everything will be fine as it is the same across the whole city. You can create a map of offsets for the major cities and be done with it.

They claim that the offset is for security purposes but this simple fix shows that the excuse is bullshit. In reality the Chinese put all kinds of barriers to entry for foreign companies to make it difficult to penetrate the market. Another example is that you have to dual home your servers to both china unicom and china Telecom, as the traffic between the two networks is degraded on purpose. You thus have to purchase a special DNS service that differentiates between requests on the two networks.

In the same vein, the purpose of the great firewall is more economic than political, being a highly successful form of protectionism.

Why don't non-china mapping companies have a table of these offsets and simply apply them everywhere (well, maybe except chinese IP adresses) ?

It seems a tiny amount of work compared to, say, gathering the actual street data itself; and it would be an useful thing to make this data available to the public like openstreetmap data.

I think you're seeing a couple different effects here.

1. The data is reported from a many varieties of GPS devices and phones. So the data is noisy. Some singles tracks will be very noisy, to the point of being fiction.

2. Not all of these tracks are on the road. If you click between bike/run/both you'll see the bike rides are more correlated with roads and the runs seem to have more "off roading."

3. some of those paths are sidewalks and pedestrian bridges and underpasses.

Have a look in GuangZhou it is definitely the China GPS skew crap.

The major routes are offset north and west of the actual roads: i.e. People are not really running/riding through lakes and rivers ;)

It seems the gps data lies SWW of the map view.

I found something very interesting in Minneapolis (where I live); it's a path that you wouldn't be able to find using google maps or probably even any bike-specific route finder.

Here's the area in google maps:

https://www.google.com/maps/@44.9837242,-93.3338652,1914a,35...

and here's the same location in the Strava heatmap:

http://labs.strava.com/heatmap/#16/-93.33287/44.98897/gray/b...

I'll have to check it out in person but I'm guessing it's a mountain bike trail or something, which is what this heatmap would be great for helping people find.

A similar effect is evident in my area, in which there is an unofficial mountain bike track. The track is well known in the mountain bike community, and the understanding is that it's location can be passed on by word of mouth, but it should generally not be publicly documented, for risk it will get closed down by the landowner. The landowner is a government owned utility and the land is unused, so bikers and local residents don't feel too may qualms about using the land. The track isn't on any of the online mapping services, but stands out like a sore thumb on the heat map. On the plus side, I can now find any tracks that I wasn't aware of!

I checked; it's not on OpenStreetMap either: http://osm.org/go/T~fdUgI3?way=26160508

Agree, and these almost look like GPS tracks. This would underlying mapssets basically irrelevant (except for exposition). I bet quite a few folks are able to pick up visuals of familiar off-piste routes with a couple of glances at familiar but not well-publicised areas.

edit: gps source>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7688240

Those are the official mountain bike trails at Theodore Wirth park. Google Maps is bad for finding mountain bike trails--it doesn't show the other Twin Cities trails at Lebanon or Murphy-Hanrehan either. They're the sort of trails you could find if you wanted to, though, by some searching or asking at bike shops.

I agree in general, though. Even if you have your own routes or know friends who have theirs, this helps break out of that rut and find some new rides. This would have been great for finding rides just across the river in Wisconsin (though as-is it wouldn't help find hills. I've always wanted a map similar to this that showed all roads in terms of both ridability and steepness).

Yep, came here to say pretty much the same thing. There are also some mountain bike trails of so-so quality down by the "blue bridge" in North Minneapolis over the Mississippi. I grew up around there so haven't checked it out in 15+ years, but it was both fun and kinda sketchy at the same time back then :)

Yup, I can also confirm those are mountain biking trails.

I used to bike past here every weekend 1.5 years ago. I clicked on the link because it said Minneapolis but I didn't expect it'd actually be a place that I've been before.

I just discovered a rail-trail I didn't know about as well. Very cool.

Looks like 17721 Bruce Ave. (or neighbor) might be a good place to steal a nice bike (Los Gatos Strava users tend to ride CF race bikes).

Turn on & off recording right at your house & you're advertising:

http://labs.strava.com/heatmap/#17/-121.98018/37.23843/gray/...

Can't remember the terminology they use but Strava allows you to define privacy areas (within a configurable radius of a point) where no points are shown on your individual routes. Exactly to stop someone working out where you live/work from browsing your history.

Either they haven't honoured this when calculating the global heatmap or, more likely (and harder to fix), such locations are given away by friends uploads (who don't have the same privacy areas defined).

Oops.

On this map I took out any point within 1km of the start or end of every ride. This is stronger than what users have set and eliminates 1000s of "hot spot".

I've looked into a couple of these cases and it's friends "coming by for a ride" or them stopping at their house mid ride.

I'm working on further eliminating these points by just not included "stopped" points. I've also tried doing some image processing to remove these hot spots but have had mixed results.

Thanks for the clarification. I know Strava takes the issue of privacy seriously!

Found a lot of residential building footprints with activity inside just browsing around at z17. Maybe you could use slide to check local activity hotspot's and cross reference them against OSM building footprints or remove those gravity spots with no uniform direction or evenly weighted exit path slope altogether.

Another approach might be only displaying common paths of 2 or more unique client id's.

There's some similar interesting artefacts in Sydney of very narrow red 'streaks' that look to be between 10 to 40 metres long.

http://labs.strava.com/heatmap/#17/-208.78860/-33.89894/gray...

Any idea what these are? I've only seen them in the bike layer

Edit: I found more in a university http://labs.strava.com/heatmap/#17/-208.81832/-33.88863/gray...

My neighbor's house lights up too. He's an avid Strava user.

I commute with Strava every day without privacy, but my address and even my street are completely empty. Probably because of the volume of users in London is so high that no one person can create a visible trail.

In addition, strava used to allow you to set your routes private by default. That no longer exists.

It't interesting looking around my local area for these 'hotspots' - they seem to always be an the cafes

Wow, this is incredibly useful for planning touring routes.

I often ride 100+ mile trips to areas I don't know very well and the hardest part is knowing what roads are more-or-less bikeable to plan a route.

Google Maps bike directions are basically worthless on long trips since they divert you way too often into neighborhoods and side streets. Strava is a perfect data set for this use case.

This is damn useful as-is, but if someone could turn this data into long-range bike directions I would absolutely pay for it.

The Strava route builder incorporates the popularity of other users routes when you plan your own. So, in an extension to the normal find-shortest-path algorithm between two points, penalties are given to paths not used by other users or bonus given to those that are popular. The result is that you end up with the better roads to ride on. Especially on the bike this is really useful as I can plan new routes in unknown areas and they are pretty good.

For running I found it remarkable how these heatmaps show the inclination to run along water bodies or in forests. It can almost perfect predict where I would or wouldn't run.

http://strava.com/routes let's you create your own route based on the popularity of segments. It's not as fast as creating a google maps route but combining the heatmap with the routes tool is a pretty surefire way of creating a solid route.

I worked the routing backend if anyone has questions. You can read more here: http://engineering.strava.com/routemaster/

The famous Delmar dividing line is quite visible in this view of St. Louis:

http://labs.strava.com/heatmap/#13/-90.28904/38.64610/gray/b...

I noticed that, too. Grant's Trail is well represented.

What is the source data? I've ridden through North St. Louis using Everytrail and my rides are public.

Edit: It is from Strava itself. I didn't know they tracked routes. lol

I follow a guy on Strava who is in the process of riding every street in St. Louis City. He's been all over the Northside. But, as this map shows, it's not a popular place to go cycling.

...not a popular place...

There's a difference between "cycling" and "cycling while using Strava". I suspect that few people who cycle because they can't afford to fix their car, or they lost their license, or their wife commutes in the single family car, etc. belong to the latter group.

You're right, of course!

For those not intimately familiar with St. Louis demographics and urban geography: http://unewsonline.com/2013/05/02/the-delmar-divide/

It's interesting to see that. My first hypothesis was probably wrong, but in the interests of open discussion, I thought, "Wait, do the poor people up north not bike or run?" I realized immediately that this was unlikely, just they don't own smartphones to track themselves, or some variant of skewed sampling. If they DON'T bike, that's sad, because biking is a money-printing fountain of youth (http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2013/06/13/bicycling-the-safe...).

Interestingly, at least for the cities in the southeast where I've lived, these maps are amazingly good proxies for gentrification. For example, have a look at Houston, TX or Memphis, TN.

In the Midwest, the trend is much less clear. For example, Madison, WI is covered with bikepaths, so there's no clear relationship. (Same for Anchorage, AK. You can see the main trail system, and it pretty much circles the city.)

In a lot of other places, the pattern is controlled by topography/parks (e.g. Birmingham, AL)

I'm limiting things to cities where I've lived, but does anyone else notice similar patterns?

Around MIT, the route around the river is pretty popular as the map shows. Except at one point you have to choose between a fork in the road -- do you take a right and run right next to the river and enjoy the water, or do you keep running straight and enjoy the rush of cars on Storrow drive as you run. Im more of a car person, but my girlfriend likes to run by the river. Strava shows me that the Storrow alternative is indeed less popular :(

http://labs.strava.com/heatmap/#17/-71.07863/42.35498/gray/b...

Awesome idea and data set, however I'm very skeptical about its quality. Random analysis: the city where I live in Brazil (Curitiba/PR) shows major avenues and bus lanes as heavily used by bikes and for running, which is partly true but it's far from as heavy as the map makes it seem; my hometown 500km from here (Praia Grande/SP) has 7x more exclusive bike lanes and running trails and yet its usage is just average while everybody I know there rides a bike (not to say the most used bike/run path the maps shows there is actually a interstate freeway).

Not everybody uses Strava, so the data is skewed a bit.

I know, but it makes the data set weaker than it is then (specially given the title of the post).

My family almost got killed once because of a bad judgement based on computer maps.

My wife and I were on a cross-country bike trip, with our dogs in tow. On this particular day, we were shooting for the Chicago area and had a long way to go from Ransom, Illinois where we woke up. There was nothing but corn, windmills, and an Air Force special training center. But we had a friend in Oak Park, and we were determined to get there and take a rest day.

After following a number of scattered trails and highways, we wound up lost in a kind of industrial alcove, trying to cross one of the canals. After a little backtracking (which is the worst), we stopped to ask for help from a bald guy in a pink tee shirt whom I'd noticed cycling earlier. He was a German guy named Rolf and he apparently biked about 60 miles a day just for fun. He told us we still had pretty far to go, and he rode with us about ten miles or so to his car, where he had a map book. He gave us detailed directions saying exactly what would be the best and safest route. We thanked him and went our separate ways.

We followed his directions until after dark (at which point we would normally have stopped). We'd already traveled close to ninety miles that day, and were getting anxious to get off the road. At some point, we called our friend to see if we were close. We told her Rolf's directions and asked if that would get us there. She said she would look online.

She called us back with a different set of directions, and, figuring that she should know her own neighborhood, proceeded to follow them. This took us onto a road that, we later learned, wound through what is essentially a wildlife refuge, and which quickly became extremely dangerous. There were no street lights, and cars were coming around turns at high speed. We decided to stop and barely got off the road in time to avoid being hit. We then had to get our bikes, dogs, and trailer across the street so we could walk the path. It was one of the scariest experiences of my life.

I later found out that our friend had never been on the road she recommended, and was going only by what it "looked like" on Google maps. (This was 2008, by the way.)

So yeah, quality. And there's no substitute for human expertise.

EDIT: and yes, it was our bad judgement as well, for taking bad advice... and maybe for not having our own maps in the first place. Although I've done thousands of miles of cross-country (in the US), and I think you really do have to wing it.

Haven't done much bicycle touring, but I've had motorcycle wheels in all of the lower 48 and parts of Canada. Something I learned years ago is to never ask locals for directions. First, a lot of people know how to get to work and to the grocery store, and that's it. Oh, they'll pretend to offer directions because no one wants to look like an idiot who doesn't know their own town. Second, even if the local knows the way their directions will be filled with all kinds of assumptions that are valid for someone who lives in the area but not for someone who is seeing the area for the first time.

Now, convincing my wife of this truism has been something I've worked on for twenty years of marriage ("why don't you stop and ask someone?" "Because it likely won't do us any good."). Thankfully GPS navigation units have made the debate somewhat moot. :-)

One big difference with this data set is that it's pulled from tracks traced by Strava users. So, modulo malicious uploaded tracks, these are all tracks that have been ridden, by definition. And if a given route is "hotter", that means more people have ridden it.

I'd fight with all my soul to prove that's utterly wrong, at least regarding the issues I've mentioned above. If the data is not 100% open it's impossible for it to be so reliable. And even if it is, that doesn't mean it's good data at all.

The data is normalized locally:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7688369

I think you are being a bit cranky about it, the text on the control panel says exactly what it is. The mechanics of the colorization aren't very apparent though.

It would be interesting to see different splits of the data, I imagine Brazil routes normalized nationally would do better with your example.

More cycling in UK and Scotland than northern Italy? Hrrmm... I'm guessing that it's indicative of more strava users than representative of total activity.

Cool map though - as others have mentioned, zooming in provides a lot of interesting detail.

SO, as a 100% bike commuter for the last ~4 years... I find this map to be interesting and definitely beautiful -- but utterly useless.

What I would love to see is: Given two points on the map - what is the most common path between them based on multi-path tracks of others...

What were their avg speeds along those routes.

How frequently did they stop.

Also, looking at SF, clearly there is no bike path across the Bay Bridge (as an aside rant, how did we spend $7.5 Billion dollars on half a bridge, adding no additional capacity and no full span bike/pedestrian throughway)...

It would be great for this map to ID bus/bart/public transit options that connect across such things like the bay bridge.

Also, the fact that the dark red is the more trafficked route(?) that was completely non-obvious to me....

"What I would love to see is: Given two points on the map - what is the most common path between them based on multi-path tracks of others..."

Check out strava.com/routes, as others have said in the thread. It doesn't have your feature requests, but it does point to point routing based on popularity.

Awesome thanks

The Bay Bridge will have a bike bridge to Treasure Island. The old span needs to be removed before it can be completed. Currently one can ride part of the path as an out and back route. http://baybridgeinfo.org/path

It would be great if the heatmap had query options.

This would then make it really useful to cycle advocacy and safety groups and even to those researching where to open cycle related businesses.

An example scenario: Say I wanted to open a bike shop and cafe in West London and I'm looking around Holland Park: http://labs.strava.com/heatmap/#14/-0.19582/51.50592/gray/bi...

It's clear that there are two main East-West routes on the North and South sides of the park (created by Hyde Park splitting traffic along two roads).

But which is the better location for the shop? The North side? Or the South?

If the line thickness could be adjusted to see differences between the two it would be helpful.

If the days of week or even hours of day could be just to restrict the data included in the lines it would be helpful.

That would allow you to determine whether the lines are purely commuters or include a decent number of weekend recreational cyclists too (more likely to give you trade 7 days per week).

Such query parameters would also allow cycle safety groups to have access to basic insights about cycle traffic loads without having already completed counting (leaving people with tally counters at junctions).

Looking at Iowa, it is pretty cool to see how many bikers do ragbrai - the 2013 route is what connects Omaha and Des Moines, 2012 is to the north of that.

Quick deep-linked url to look specifically at San Francisco for those interested (this map really only starts getting interesting when zoomed pretty far in to a specific city)

http://labs.strava.com/heatmap/#13/-122.45242/37.76345/blue/...

Any idea what this starburst over the USC campus police headquarters is all about?

http://labs.strava.com/heatmap/#17/-118.29075/34.02060/gray/...

Since it only shows up on the bike activity, I'm assuming it's people parking in the structure and the GPS losing accuracy inside.

Interestingly, the same patterns happen in Vancouver when downtown near all the highrises: http://labs.strava.com/heatmap/#16/-123.11986/49.28436/gray/...

The noise may well be indirectly tracking building height. ;)

They might be riding it up and down some too, the connections to the blob don't have much intensity.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, you can use this to see what areas of town (e.g., Oakland) people consider safe and which ones they consider sketch. There's also no doubt a high correlation with socioeconomic status and path intensity.

Uhh... water bicycles? http://labs.strava.com/heatmap/#12/-122.98491/37.73441/gray/...

The actual activity is self reported. Maybe they are doing a triathlon / iron man. Quite a few pro athletes use Strava.

It looks like a boat/jet ski ride. Lot's of loops and turns, no right angles.

Perhaps boaters are using Strava.

People use strava for many more activities than just running and biking. Some people uses if while snowboarding/sking. I've personally used it while power kite-bugging.

Take a look at Puget Sound west of Seattle, and you'll see lots of walking and riding on water, following Washington ferry routes.

While obviously they're just anomoloies in the reporting, It amused me seeing hotspots within water

http://labs.strava.com/heatmap/#17/-208.82432/-33.87246/gray...

Does anyone know, if strava supports showing you the heatmap of all routes and the routes you recorded as two layers of different colors on the same map?

If not, it would be a cool feature for exploring new routes on my bike...

(I come from Belgium)

Belgium heatmap is really funny. Flemish people bike so much compared to walloon people: http://cl.ly/image/1R2G0z2k1K2S

Earlier discussion, although it only got a few comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7681301

In India, every poor person's primary mode of commute is a cycle. But such cycles are not GPS tracked, and hence his tracks will never feature in such a map.

Based on what the map says about my local area, the results seem quite er... surprising... in that they don't really match what one sees on the ground (especially for cycling). And when I say "don't really match" I mean "are completely out of wack"...

I suppose it's because the results only reflect users of this app, and there's a correlation between app users and certain types of usage.

This is a trail-poacher's dream. It'd be wonderful to have this cross-indexed with any extant publicly available data sources (state/national parks, property lines etc.) to try to determine the legality of a given route. Illegal trails are likely illuminated by this heatmap, but their illegality is not.

This is pretty impressive. In 2012 I worked in a research project where we did something similar but for a smaller area (vienna). See http://meineradspur.at/ including color coded information about the speed of the cyclists.

I found an industrial park that appears to be the next best thing to a Velodrome for local cyclists. Very cool map!

http://labs.strava.com/heatmap/#15/-119.86045/34.43307/yello...

Industrial parks are popular for criterium races ("crits") and practice races, which is probably what you're seeing there.

Here's one I've raced in a few times. Looks like it's not quite as popular, though! http://labs.strava.com/heatmap/#16/-89.48204/43.05660/yellow...

That's ucsb's crit & iv classic. Source: raced there many times. Info on crits http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criterium

Yes, Yes, and more yes. This is awesome. for someone who likes to roughly map out routes before trips, being able to see "Do locals ride this road or this one" is huge. Might convince me to create a new strava account (lost my old one when I quit facebook a year ago)

(Is there a Hacker News Strava group?)

wow! I just found some trails right next to my house, didn't even know they existed!

http://labs.strava.com/heatmap/#16/-122.11865/47.78666/gray/...

I wonder what's going on here: http://labs.strava.com/heatmap/#17/-0.01296/51.49360/gray/bi...

The location corresponds to a supermarket.

Just speculation, but I've sometimes seen GPS traces like that when a unit enters a building. You can get a very erratic, low-accuracy set of data points back that look qualitatively similar to the pattern in your link.

Interesting. Thanks.

Interesting. In the United States it would appear to be an excellent proxy for affluence.

Without looking too deeply into the data, in my neighborhood it showed two long routes for both biking and running and seeing these spots every day I would absolutely fear for my life if I attempted to run or bike on either of them.

It seems like a lot of intersections are darker than the streets surrounding them. I'm assuming this is due to stop signs or stop lights. Perhaps this could give us some information about poorly-timed lights?

Okay, this is just hardcore.

http://labs.strava.com/heatmap/#11/-117.10332/36.51021/blue/...

my conclusion from this is that a lot of people in Brookline and Allston need to buy "Great Runs in Brookline"[1]. No affiliation on my part, just the knowledge that book put me onto a lot of great running routes that aren't covered very well at all by these Strava wearers. There is more to the area than Beacon St, Comm Ave, and the Chestnut Hill Reservoir.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Great-Runs-Brookline-Vicinity-Lowenste...

I wonder how many of those data points are mine? Disappointingly I can't find any route that I alone have run or ridden - that's something to fix this summer I think.

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7681301

Interesting to compare a view between running and cycling. Runners tend to run on the same side of a road in both directions.

A lot of the trails in the Santa Cruz area aren't legal riding. Interesting how people report these publicly on Strava.

I wonder about that bike track to the summit of Mt Rainier...

That map is no where near accurate. Most of Europe is essentially nothing but a cycling and running route and should essentially be lit up red all over.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com