Ben Lowe – VeloViewer

Spotting and resolving Flagged Strava Activities using VeloViewer

Posted on December 23, 2025 | by Ben Lowe | Leave a Comment

I’ve had a bit of a run lately of old Ride activities being auto-flagged as potential E-Bike rides as Strava’s algorithms work through trying to spot and deal with potentially mis-typed activities and other data anomalies. There was a time when I was relatively fit on the bike and it looks to be some of the rides where I had a bit of an effort that have been flagged. Once flagged, these activities will no longer appear on Segment Leaderboards in Strava or count towards your Summary/Leaderboard totals in VeloViewer. Fortunately they are prominently listed for you in VeloViewer and then easy to resolve in Strava.

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Highlighting newly ticked VeloViewer Explorer Tiles in the Activities Page

Posted on August 8, 2025 | by Ben Lowe | 8 Comments

A slight lull in work coding for and supporting the professional peloton has allowed me to add some long-outstanding VeloViewer Explorer Tile features, namely the highlighting of newly ticked tiles for an activity in the Activities Map, along with total and new tile count columns.

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Effects of the 2024 Strava Segment Declutter in VeloViewer

Posted on October 1, 2024 | by Ben Lowe | Leave a Comment

On 26th September 2024, Strava announced “Segment Updates: Verified Segments, Decluttering and Leaderboard FAQ’s“. The goals are to remove duplicated as well as messy (bad GPS data) segments, tidy up the leaderboards (removing dodgy times) and to introduce “verified” segments. The result should be tidier segment lists for your Strava activities. Some of you will remember that in Jan 2021 almost all Zwift Virtual Ride segments were deleted (apart from Zwift-Insider’s segments used in the ZI leaderboard in VeloViewer ) which was a welcome relief to my API rate limits, given how many segments there used to be!

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Men’s Tour of Britain comes to Sheffield

Posted on September 2, 2024 | by Ben Lowe | 1 Comment

We have been eagerly awaiting the Men’s Tour of Britain having had a brilliant day out in Wrexham at the Women’s Tour of Britain back in June. With Remco Evenepoel, Julian Alaphilippe and Tom Pidcock all confirmed, it is set to be a fantastic event.

We were excited to learn early on in the race development that there would be a Stage in VeloViewer’s hometown of Sheffield, and it has been fun working with Rod Ellingworth (Race Director), Andy Hawes (Route Director) and their team over the last few months as they planned, recon’d and refined the routes.

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Update to Detailed VeloViewer Explorer Tile Ticking

Posted on April 8, 2024 | by Ben Lowe

A post at the geekier end of the spectrum as a couple of small changes to the VeloViewer Explorer Tile calculations are rolled out to fine tune some of those edge-case scenarios where tiles might have been missed. One key area was addressing the very rare occasions where your GPS device didn’t record a point in the required spot as your route crossed the very corner of a tile – the good news is this should now be sorted.

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Race Recon with Remco

Posted on December 10, 2023 | by Ben Lowe

One of our 2023 highlights – the legend that is Remco Evenepoel showing us how the pro riders use the VeloViewer WorldTour package for race prep.

Four glorious minutes of Remco preparing for the first mountain stage of La Vuelta 2023. Teams highlight the technical sections, intermediate sprints, gradient changes and much more. This info helps riders to identify key strategic attacking opportunities.

VeloViewer Explorer Tile 3D Heatmap in Google Earth

Posted on January 18, 2023 | by Ben Lowe | 6 Comments

I’ve wanted to produce this view of VeloViewer Explorer Tiles since I first came up with the idea back in 2015 and can only put my lack of action down to being too busy with the professional teams these last few years! Simple idea though: provide a KML output that can be viewed in Google Earth shows a tower for each ticked Explorer Tile with the height representing the number of times the tile has been visited on your travels.

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Veloviewer Explorer Tiles – Global Heatmap

Posted on May 27, 2022 | by Ben Lowe | 46 Comments

When I meet VeloViewer users out and about, the enjoyment of ticking off VeloViewer Explorer Tiles is the most common feedback I get. Since I came up with the idea of Explorer Tiles back in 2015 1000’s of VeloViewer users have been discovering new roads and trails close to where they live and further afield. A global heatmap of the ticked tiles has been on my to-do list since 2015 so it is embarrassing that it has taken so long to make it a reality! But wait no longer.

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Bamford Clough, the Steepest Road in the UK (World)?

Posted on September 20, 2021 | by Ben Lowe

A new contender for the steepest paved road in the UK (or perhaps even in the world if we’re talking Tarmac road) has reared its head after Bamford Clough recently received a pristine layer of smooth Tarmac up its (unofficial) 36.5 % slopes. A few contenders for the world’s steepest street/road have popped up over recent years looking to topple New Zealand’s Baldwin Street (34.8 %) in Dunedin so will Bamford Clough be a possible contender?

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Viewing all of your Strava Photos on VeloViewer

Posted on February 18, 2021 | by Ben Lowe | 36 Comments

If you are anything like me then looking back at photographs from past adventures brings all of those feelings rushing back. Whether it was of that ludicrous ride where you bit off far more than you could chew (I blame Simon Warren for most of those) or that image of the fantastic cafe stop when chewing was the highlight. With the integration of your Strava photos into VeloViewer you can now browse through all of your exploits on the map or thumbnail view with the added benefit of VeloViewer’s activity filtering to quickly narrow down the photos you want to see.

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