Over the past few days I’ve been cleaning up a lot of Strava related user error reports. I’ve managed about 500 or so across the southern hemisphere; with a surprisingly high hit rate of actual issues.

One thing that has been quite obvious is that much of Latin America has a very active hiking and biking population; but a relatively poor routing experience.

There’s two easy ways to help in mere minutes:

Keepright’s Highway-Highway check

http://keepright.ipax.at/report_map.php?zoom=14&lat=-23.58791&lon=-46.65713

Look at the error, and decide if the two ways actually do join.

ID makes it quite easy to make a new junction, occasionally you might need to model a tunnel or bridge instead.

This is well suited to remote mapping; though imagery can be somewhat dated or misleading at times.

Strava’s heatmap enabled error report tool

http://labs.strava.com/routing-errors/

While you may not speak spanish or portugese, a lot of errors fall into the category of “there is a rural/unpaved road which is not traced”; and it’s very obvious from GPS data. Google translate can help immensely in understanding the basics.

Why São Paulo?

I’ve opted for São Paulo as a good place to focus; as it’s home to about 12-20 million people in the core/surrounding metro area - it’s effectively the 3rd largest city in the world.

In particular with the keepright errors; it’s plausible we can get to very few uncertain/unresolved issues in a reasonable amount of time.

This directly benefits anyone using Strava, OSMAnd, Scout, Maps.me for driving, cycling or jogging; which in turn is likely to lead to feedback (street names, for example or better GPS traces).

There’s also a quite active mapping community; who may not realise the impact they can have due to the visual map looking “complete” in a lot of ways.

If you’d like to help, spend a few minutes on either of the above two methods!