Strava

Strava v · d
License:	Proprietary
Platforms:	Web, Android, and iOS
Status:	Active
Website:	https://www.strava.com
Install:	Google Play App Store
Features Feature Value Map Display Display map yes Map data ? Source online;offline Rotate map yes 3D view yes Shows website ? Shows phone number ? Shows operation hours ? Routing Routing yes Create route manually yes Calculate route yes Create route via Waypoints yes Routing profiles run;trail run;walk;hike;bike;mountain bike;gravel bike Turn restrictions ? Calculate route without Internet (Offline routing) ? Routing providers ? Avoid traffic ? Traffic Provider ? Navigating ? Tracking ? Monitoring ? Editing ? Rendering ? Accessibility ?

Strava is an internet service used to track athletic activity via GPS. Its headquarters are located in San Francisco, California, USA.

Most popular activities tracked are cycling, running and hiking. In 2018, the Strava dataset contained 13 trillion latitude/longitude points from over 1 billion activities with a total distance of 27 billion km.^[1]

Strava uses OpenStreetMap for their maps, specifically a "terrain" style rendered and hosted by Mapbox.^[2] OSM and Mapbox replaced Google Maps, previously used:

• Static maps (the small thumbnail map images) both on the web and within the mobile apps have used OpenStreetMap since early 2014.
• Slippy maps on the web have switched from Google Maps to OpenStreetMap mid 2015. Slippy maps in the Android and iPhone apps switched in early 2021.^[3]
• Routing, and the "route builder" is based off OSM data.

There is also the strava-map-switcher browser extension that extends the Strava website with more detailed and/or recent maps (Mapy.com, Freemap Slovakia, MTB map Europe, …).

The Global Heatmap shows where Strava users have recorded activities. It covers the last year of activities and is updated monthly.^[4] It can be filtered by activity group (foot, cycle, water, winter sports) or by single sport type, and shown in several color schemes.

The full-resolution heatmap is only available to users logged into a (free) Strava account. Without login, only low zoom levels are shown.

If the heatmap does not show after logging in, set a location at https://www.strava.com/settings/profile and the map will appear.

OpenStreetMap users have permission (reconfirmed in November 2019) to use the Strava heatmap data for tracing into OSM only. For all other non-personal uses, including tracing into other datasets, please contact Strava Metro.

The data is available on a purchasable license basis, so it is great that Strava allows the data to be used free of charge for the purposes of improving OpenStreetMap (similar agreements exist with aerial imagery providers). Please be aware that this is a great tool to find missing paths, but that the presence of heatmap lines does not necessarily mean that access on that location is legal for the general public. Also the type of activity for some Strava tracks might be incorrectly specified (e.g., cycling tracks over large bodies of non-frozen water).

The heatmap is published as raster XYZ tiles (256 × 256 px), one tile set per activity and color scheme. Logged-in users get tiles up to zoom 15; editors can zoom further and scale the zoom 15 tiles.

Authentication relies on cookies set by strava.com after login. This is why most editors need a browser extension or a proxy to show the full-resolution heatmap (see below).

Dates are approximate: they are when editor tools had to adapt.

Activity groups:

• all: all sports
• run: all foot sports
• ride: all cycle sports
• water: all water sports
• winter: all winter sports

Since 2025, single sport types are also available as sport_TYPE, for example sport_Run, sport_TrailRun, sport_Walk, sport_Hike, sport_Ride, sport_MountainBikeRide, sport_GravelRide, sport_EBikeRide, sport_Kayaking, sport_Swim, sport_AlpineSki, sport_BackcountrySki, sport_NordicSki, sport_Snowshoe. These are useful to tell a footpath from a bike trail, or a ski route from a summer path.

• Pre-colored tiles (v=19): blue, bluered, purple, orange, hot, gray.
• Strava website (since 2026): Blue, Purple, Orange, Sunset, Pink, Contrast and Blue-Red, applied to the grayscale tiles. Tools that cannot color tiles themselves use the closest v=19 color.

Because tiles need the strava.com cookies, first log into strava.com in your browser, then use one of these tools.

Since March 2025, copying cookie values into a TMS URL no longer works: Strava requires them as cookies, not as URL parameters. A manual setup needs a client that can send custom request headers, or one of the proxies above. The cookies to send are listed in URL history; they can be read in the browser's developer tools (Storage / Application tab, Cookies, strava.com) after logging in.

The pre-2025 step-by-step method (cookie values in the URL, stravaheatmap Python utility, userscript) is kept in the page history.

If you have a question regarding editing with the heatmap, please ask the OSM community, for example on the Community Forum.

The low-resolution heatmap is not detailed enough to be used for tracing into OSM, but it can show where to look for missing roads or paths. It is in JOSM's imagery list (see the Strava entries) and can be enabled in the imagery preferences.

A Python script is available to draw GPS routes along the centerline of the heatmap, and export them as GPX or for use in QGIS: https://github.com/sudface/strava_heatmap_tracer/

Slide was created by Paul Mach at Strava Labs in 2014 (State of the Map US 2014). It moves a roughly drawn way onto the nearby heatmap trace. Strava's hosted iD fork (labs.strava.com/slide) is no longer online.

Since 2026, an independent reimplementation for iD is part of the Strava Heatmap browser extension: select a way and press ⇧ Shift+S. Always review the result before saving: the heatmap smooths sharp corners and switchbacks, and a stronger parallel trail can pull the way away from its own.

Many different source=* tags are used but the common ones are:

source=Strava

source=strava

source=Strava Heatmap

Strava has an API. Most of the information available relates to a specific user or their friends and so requires login through a Strava account. It does not give access to the heatmap.

Strava can be highly accurate in showing the location of where people travel while exercising or training, with the exceptions listed below. However, it doesn't tell you whether they are traveling on a road, trail, or something else. It doesn't tell you if access is legal, it doesn't tell you the surface, difficulty, etc.

Downsides:

• Data freshness
  • The heatmap is for the past year, so if a trail was recently closed, it will still show "heat" for some time.
  • The heatmap is updated monthly, so new features, and reroutes of existing features will not immediately show up, and even after the first update or two there may not be much heat.
• Data bias
  • Unless filtered, the heatmap is for all activities, including winter-only activities done on winter only routes. For example a ski route over a frozen lake should not be mapped as a standard highway=path/footway/cycleway/bridleway/track.
  • For roads and tracks, if people preferentially spend more time on one side of the road than the other (e.g. they prefer doing a loop in one direction vs the other, or there is a hill that slows them down), the heatmap will be skewed to that side.
  • For wide features, such as roads with cycle lanes on either side, the heatmap will show two hot paths, one of which may be hotter. If you are mapping the road, you need to pick the middle of the "heat", rather than the "hottest" location. You can think of it as a bimodal distribution, of which you take the middle point (the center of the road) rather than one of the modes (one of the hot paths on the side of the road).
  • The heatmap is an average, as such it is a low pass filter, and it will tend to smooth out sharp corners and switchbacks. Automatic tools such as Slide inherit this, so check their result.
  • Strava user base is biased toward wealthier younger to middle-aged males and specific sports like cycling and running, so inference of popularity of trails, sports, and locations from the heat map will be biased in the direction of its user base.^[6]
  • The heatmap is an average of multiple Strava workouts, a seemingly popular path could be only a few users taking a daily run at a location, or hundreds of individual people. Minimum user threshold applies as Strava does not show heat for an area until multiple users have traversed it in the last year. Likewise one-time events show up brightly, like a single large race with hundreds of participants.
  • Popularity of trails is difficult to judge, while you can get a general idea, there is no known mapping from Strava heatmap colors, at a specific zoom level, to density/popularity of trail usage.

Benefits:

• Data freshness
  • The heatmap is a rather current view (last 12 months, updated monthly) of an area, so data can be more fresh than aerial imagery. Along with new trails, it can show if a path is no longer used, or has shifted.
• Accurate location information
  • The Strava heatmap is averaged across various people's GPS tracks from multiple independent GPS devices averaging away inaccuracies in GPS.
  • The heatmap doesn't suffer from relief/parallax displacement issues seen on aerial images of hills due to the satellite/plane/drone not having a perfect downward view which causes paths to not align on different image sources. This makes it a strong ground truth on hilly terrain. This can be combined with high detailed aerial imagery to set the overall placement of the path from the heatmap, and detailed corners and switchbacks from the aerial imagery.
  • Trees often obscure the path in aerial images, the heatmap shows the paths the people use and is not affected by the tree cover.
  • Desire paths (informal=yes) are shown even in areas where the path is quickly obscured, like in sand or fast growth grasses. It shows where people actually travel including shortcuts that people take which are often not published on official park maps.
• Other
  • Travel modes (foot vs. bike vs. skiing) can be determined by looking at those specific activity heatmaps, which helps infer between a bike trail and a footpath.

• Strava Global Heatmap
• Permissions/Strava
• Slide source code
• Slide, State of the Map 2014 slides