STRAVA Routes – Personalised, Heatmap Routing for 2020

Today STRAVA rolled out a great new addition to their route offering. In a nutshell, it gives you a means of creating a personalised, popularity-based, round-trip route.

Background

STRAVA has had generic route functionality for some time. With varying degrees of awesomeness, you can manually draw, save, and sync your own routes, and you can also check STRAVA’s local guide, which includes a few curated rides/runs. In the past, you may have relied on other navigation devices for clever, on-the-fly routing options when you were somewhere new. I’ve used round-trip routing on the Mio Cyclo and on the newer Garmin Fenix models.

new Heatmap Routing – Basics

• Start/End Point – You can choose where you are now or search for a point like ‘Box Hill’.
• Ride/Run – Self-explanatory.
• Distance – Running presents fixed distances from 2km to 50km and cycling from 2km to 160km.
• Elevation – Flat, Hilly or based purely on popularity.
• Surface – Dirt, Paved or any/popular

When you have finalised your criteria, STRAVA presents you with 3 route choices which you can see outlined against each other on a map or which you can drill down into for more details including the elevation profile and the type of surface on your chosen route.

You then save your route and it will sync to connected devices as normal and, if you’ve saved it as a public route, you can share with friends.

new Heatmap Routing – Problems

In my opinion, Strava heatmap routing is awesome and leads to big leaps forward in getting you from A to B (or, in this case, back to A).

However. People use STRAVA for all sorts of annoying reasons, like ‘going to work’ or ‘recording a walk as a run’. So STRAVA’s heatmap could include a major road in a part of its automatically generated route for you. The few cursory checks that I’ve made show STRAVA is having a good crack and generally missing out commuter routes. They do allow us to tag rides as COMMUTES, so maybe that was part of the exclusion algorithm.

On SHORTER cycling routes, I found there to be more problems. Out in the countryside, the routes seemed much more sensible and also sensible for running.

This feature is only available to SUMMIT/PREMIUM subscribers. I’d say…‘Fair enough’. STRAVA have to make their money somehow.

new Heatmap Routing – Interesting Bits

• When using an iPhone, STRAVA used Apple’s maps; for Android it used MapBox. Neither showed STRAVA’s heatmap.
• In their press release, STRAVA said: “We use map matching to snap GPS pings to known edges (roads and trails) to establish popular waypoints… our route recommendations are based on a robust database of activities that allow for a higher quality of route recommendations.”

Opinion

I like the new round-trip route creator. It seems to work well with my limited usage so far. STRAVA’s routing is only going to get better and I believe it already warrants availability only to STRAVA Summit members.

I can’t really see myself using this except maybe once a year when I want to create a round trip route AND share it with friends. I personally prefer never to use smartphones for or during running and cycling.

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Last Updated on 28 May 2026 by the5krunner

the5krunner

tfk is the founder and author of the5krunner, an independent endurance sports technology publication. With 20 years of hands-on testing of GPS watches and wearables, and competing in triathlons at an international age-group level, tfk provides in-depth expert analysis of fitness technology for serious athletes and endurance sport competitors. ID