Heat maps generally tend to mean ‘commuting routes are very hot’, which is great if you’re trying to get to work, but not so much if doing a long rides passing through/close to various towns where you find yourself spending half the time on a cycle lane next to a busy road.
Just applied to cancel my Strava subscription via Apple. Straight forward enough and I’m currently in search of a replacement.
Who has moved to where and how are they getting on with their replacement.
I’ll probably end up with training peaks and their 25% discount offer but wanted to see if there were alternatives
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I’ve set it up that both intervals and trainingpeaks sync everything…just in case!
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I see the calendar now shows the Zwift logo on the map. I think that’s new, used to show the Strava one previously for Zwift activities? As the data was coming from there.
Guess TR have changed it to reflect where the activity happened rather than where the data was pushed to TR from? Funnily enough TR workouts show a Strava logo rather than a TR one.
No logo at all for outdoor ride which would have come from Garmin, maybe as it comes from Strava and Garmin, TR haven’t put a logo on it.
I found that there were sections of road that were perfectly legal, usable, & safe to cycle on that Strava flatly refused to draw a route on. Olinda Grove to Southern Outlet southbound at Mt Nelson, Tasmania is one example off the top of my head. Yeah you can draw it in freehand but I found it messed things up elsewhere in the route. And sometimes flicking between freehand & using waypoints caused Strava to ignore what I’d drawn freehand previously! 
So I just use the mymaps section of Google Maps, export to kml, & it’s pretty easy to convert in a text editor to a GPX.
I had a look at the other tools today, creating the same route in all of them, and for my use case, the Strava heat maps really make their tool much faster to use than the others. Do any of the other tools have cycling specific heat maps that differentiate surface type like Strava does? Since some tools seem to be better in different regions, I’m in the US.
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If you’ve arrived in an area you don’t know, or know well, then I can see that heat maps have real utility.
But outside of that use case, they’re of no interest to me because what I want are quality routes, and in my experience “frequency of use” (ie. “heat”) doesn’t correlate with “quality”…
Or worse, it correlates with poor quality, because the routes most popular with bike riders also happen to be the most popular with vehicle drivers - probably because bike riders are nearly always also drivers, and generally are either not particularly imaginative in their route choices, or they are outsiders lacking local knowledge. As a result, the heat maps generally tell me where not to ride 
Although I’ve been a Strava subscriber for some time, I prefer Komoot for route planning as it gives me good control during the route creation process. Horses for courses - we’ve all got slightly different requirements and preferences.
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This. Never understood the popularity of heatmaps for course creation. I live in a town a few miles outside a major city, with a main road going through it. Weekends are full of cyclists from the city ploughing straight down the main road to get to the countryside and more scenic / quieter roads beyond, totally ignorant to some of the far superior, quieter routes around the outskirts of my town.
And similarly there’s a big national park on my doorstep, which is great for running & cycling through in summer. In winter, it closes much earlier in the day and shuts entirely on some days. But it completely dominates the heatmap due to the lack of local knowledge about whether it’s even available.
I’ve been using Footpath to do my routing - I’d never even heard of it until the kerfuffle about Strava stealing their ideas a few years back. I preferred it over Strava to the point where it was the catalyst for me to cancel my Strava premium sub and subscribe to Footpath instead.
Heat maps are self reinforcing. They discourage exploring the roads less travelled, which may actually be gems that not many know about.
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I guess if you never ride anywhere new, I understand the “anti-heatmap” sentiment. I like to go new places and ride new roads. I find heat maps invaluable for that. They’re also great for finding popular gravel, paths, and trails that aren’t obvious from street maps. As for the “the heat maps just focus on busy roads” statements, that’s true to a point, but that’s why I use my eyes to see if people are riding on busy roads or not when creating my routes. If the map is brightest on a busy road, I don’t choose that road.
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Same for me, watch and computer.
However, I think Strava will have inertia like Facebook. Everyone is on it, but no one likes having to be on it, but because everyone is on it, everyone will stay on it. I will probably not renew a premium subscription.
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I cancelled my subscription and am interacting with it less, and actually feel as though it is having a positive impact on my mental health. Before whether it was conscious or unconscious I would see people doing lots of activities and feel obligated to do so as well. Now it’s on my terms.
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Depending on your use case intervals icu might be a good alternative.
Becoming a supporter costs $48 a year, about half of the TP annual cost.
TP adds TP Virtual which intervals doesn’t have.
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I think it’s partly addiction and fear of missing out. You just have to go through that cold turkey phase, before fulling withdrawing and closing things down.
I’m not missing my rides being pushed to Strava. I’m still looking at friends rides for now. Mostly out of my addiction habit I’d think. That too will pass, and when I’m ready I can delete my Strava account.
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I am not visiting Strava much at the moment due to the nasty taste they’ve left in my mouth, but I can definitely feel the addictive quality trying to draw me back ,thinking that I ought to give kudos to the couple of friends who are doing their pb out there on rides.
I was also wondering about the privacy problem, kinda trying to be nice to Strava!!!
For example. If I do a 40 mile ride, and then use the Strav privacy control to hid the first and last mile, that still shows on Strava as a 40 mile ride. If another app takes this ride information, do they automatically keep the same privacy settings? So if I send it to another app, will it also be hiding my home location? Or does it then get displayed as a 38 mile ride?
Does that make sense? If I pursue the secondary app for revealing my home location, does that make Strava jointly liable?
I know the original writing was about third party coaching etc. just me wondering what other reason they could possibly have!
I also find all of this frustrating but I am not aware of a good alternative. I like the social aspect of Strava as it is really the only “social” app I use as I never post on FB or Instagram and is nice to keep in touch with other riders.
Secondly, I like being able to see various segments to see where my fitness is at. It is nice to see the various times I have on segments for comparison. Second, this was super helpful this year pre-riding Leadville to get a relatively good gauge of where I was at. I am not a “KOM” hunter but do find the segments helpful when reviewing rides.
Between the social piece and segment piece I don’t think there is a good alternative. I know Ride With GPS has segments but it is very minimal and not as easy to look at. With that said, I do like the RWGPS route planner way better than Strava and use it all the time to plan routes.
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A third party app gets the full data, it would need to set up its own privacy feature and you would need to set it up to hide your home location in that app. For example, if I send a run or ride to Strava, and hide the first and last mile or set up a privacy radius in Strava, when that activity gets pulled into Intervals.icu, I can see the whole activity. To hide my home location in Intervals.icu, I’d need to use its own privacy circles feature.
But that raises an interesting point. Looking at the Strava API, I think Strava treats partially private activities as public, as in, if you hide the beginning and end in Strava or set up a privacy area, but the activity is otherwise public, a third-party app has no way of knowing that, so they’d show the whole activity. Maybe that explains why they went with the “Third-party apps are no longer able to display your Strava activity data on their surfaces to other users” route, because otherwise they’d need to change their API to support these privacy options so they instead went with the easier blanket ban.
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I did a bulk export from Strava to Ride with GPS last year. The privacy zones from Strava do not transfer, the rides were uploaded with the full GPS track displayed.
RWGPS offers their own privacy zone settings, but they are based around a specific point and not ride-distance based. You choose the radius from an address to hide, with Strava (as you noted) you can hide the start and end point no matter where the ride starts.
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I think Strava also lets you hide particular locations, a certain radius around an address (I think they use postcodes in 
) so you could enter addresses of family and work and not worry that you could be tracked that closely.
That said, if someone downloaded all my rides , that would have a bunch of rides that stop near home, so my heatmap would have a neat circle 
of blankness, so I actually entered several overlapping postcodes to increase the radius and disperse the centrality.
Just in case anyone was wondering, if you cancel your strava subscription and have time remaining on it, they will refund the remainder. I just did this. Cancelled via the website. Then raised a support ticket attaching proof of purchase and said I want a pro rata refund on the remainder because they have changed the terms and conditions to which I signed up. They came back to me within 24 hours and have refunded my remaining 8 months and put me back to the free version.
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