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Title says it all. Anyone else having issues with Strava mapping you to segments that you weren’t on? Almost all rides I have done lately have mapped me to nearby segments. When I actually do those segments in the future I will not remember which times are real and which are errors.
Today I took a morning ride and a stick took out my derailleur and broke a spoke. Two good things were: 1) I was able to get the derailleur off the bike and get the chain pulled out of the way and 2) I had been climbing up to that point and only had to walk about 10 feet to the street and I was able to was able to scooter and coast back home. When I got home I noticed my light was missing.
Later in the day, I took my single speed out to look for the light. I decided to backtrack the ride because I figured the most likely place to find it would be where I broke. To get the breakdown spot, I rode up the side walk to get there and back down the trail. Didn’t find the light but I suppose I could have lost it yesterday on a different trail.
When I got home I looked at my Strava, it had mapped me onto the climb segment at half the time it normally takes. The trail starts at the edge of the woods and dips deeper into the woods several times then back close to the edge but I rode in a straight line. The Strava map makes it look like I was on the trail, does not look like a straight line. At some point I’ll forget that this was an error. This has happened several other times but those were at least close to where I was or a different line choice.
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I don’t think this is a Strava issue as much as it is a GPS issue. I ride with a Garmin watch which is fairly accurate most of the time. However, I’ve ridden multiple loops of the same trails or done “out and backs” and find that there are times that the tracking is way off from one lap to another. The same has happened when using my phone. I assume that much of this variation is due to the fact that I ride in wooded areas with a lot of tree canopy that may obscure the signal at times. TBH, I don’t know if it ever credited me with riding certain segments that I in fact never really rode although I suspect it probably has occurred. The worst part for me was trying to nail a PR in several segments only to find that the GPS was so far off that Strava never even recorded the segments but the guys I was riding with posted Top 10 finishes. It sux, but it is what it is.
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@rmap01 I use a Garmin smartwatch for tracking and I know that trees aren’t going to help matters. If I am already in the woods it can be hard to get a signal to start recording.
But here’s the thing. This is happening to me when I am riding sidewalks that border the parks and are not wooded. It happened again this morning. Check out the segment from Strava: https://www.strava.com/segments/19676151
This is an extremely sketchy decent. Look at the grade at the switchback. Plus it is narrow and has drops. No one is going down this in 24 seconds. What they are doing is going down the bike path to the west (in yellow). Still dangerously fast because the corner is blind due to overgrown shrubs. I’ve gone over 31 on the bike path. I have gone 10 on the trail. I’m going to say the trail averages 20 feet off the path and ends at 50 feet away.
My GPS data is good. It shows me on the path for at least 50% of the run and only 6 ft to east for the rest. I think the problem is Strava when there are segments that are close together. It mapped me to this segment as well: https://www.strava.com/segments/15747940.
The crazy thing is there is a trail between these two segments. It continues straight instead of doing the switchback. It sticks pretty close to the edge of the woods and is full of punchy climbs. It is the trail that I do when I am not headed to work and is really good for practicing keeping your momentum.
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@vapidoscar Just had the same thing happen to me yesterday. Strava “mapped” me to a segment very nearby the one I was riding. But it clearly seems to be a GPS issue. If you go to Garmin’s support page here’s what it says:
“Garmin GPS receivers are accurate to within 15 meters (49 feet) 95% of the time. Generally, users will see accuracy within 5 to 10 meters (16 to 33 feet) under normal conditions.”
If this is the stated accuracy under “normal” conditions (which I assume means “pristine” conditions and even then only 95% of the time) then it’s actually surprising that our segments normally get mapped correctly especially when you have separate trails that are closer than the GPS margin of error. The bigger issue to me is when you see segment times in the top 10 that are just not possible, which again I assume is a GPS-related issue.
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