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 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.