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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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!
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.
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).
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.