Velo Flow allows you to view and interact with animated Strava rides. Getting started with Velo Flow can be a little confusing but the video below walks you through how to do it step by step. The second video shows you some of the hidden features in Velo Flow explaining how to highlight multiple riders and more.
The Basics
The context ride in the video was the excellent La Squadra/Rapha ride which is held each year. View the VeloFlow here.
So to recap:
- Find your ride.
- Find the best segment (one that everyone you want would have ridden).
- Click the Velo Flow triangle for that segment.
- Load the rides.
- Have a play!
Secret Features
Thanks to @CakeBikeCake for bringing this Strava’ed CX race to my attention, his blog post on the event can be found here.
- Default number of riders – add “&nr=50” to url (number must be in the list).
- Default time gap – add “&tg=1” to url (number must be in the list).
- Add multiple context riders – find those riders ride ID’s from Strava and add them to the activityId value in the url with commas between each one (6 maximum). (video at 5m 41s)
- Rider tails (as requested over on NYVeloCity) – add “&a=60” to the url. Any number can be used and the tails will be the length, in seconds, of this number multiplied by the time gap. (video at 3m 47s)
Watch the result
(yes I’ve noticed the typo/spelling error, too much hassle to fix!)
View the Velo Flow of the CX race in the video to try it out for yourself.
These new features just keep on coming!
I’ve now, just about, got VeloFlow to do what was my initial, main mission for the page: show all the rides in a particular region for a particular day. This is achieved by adding as many segment id’s (comma delimited) as required to the url and VeloFlow will aggregate all the rides together and display a combined animation of all those rides. You will need to use Strava’s segment explorer to find all your required segment ids, remembering that segments are only in a single direction so you’ll need a segment in each direction to get all riders riding along a particular road. e.g.
- segmentId=1449606,697577,612982
Here is a video for all the rides on 25th May, 2012 using segments covering off as many of the ways in and out of Hope Valley in Derbyshire:
View this VeloFlow itself here.
When looking at the VeloFlow map if you click the map options button (the little + in the top right of the map) then you’ve got the option of turning on the segments overlay. This then shows each of the segments you have picked and the direction (gradient from green to blue in the direction of travel).
Now you can see the possibility for tourist offices or town planners to get an idea how the cycle traffic passes through their areas and using what routes.
And again!
Now you can also add something things like:
- &days=7 to display a cumulative view of all rides for a whole week.
- &athleteId=306128,123456 instead of the activityId’s to highlight all rides for those riders over the time period (which also works for a single day).
- &title=DarkPeak MTB for a more readable title when sharing links.
An example of this is would be this VeloFlow showing all mountain bike rides for the month of July, 2012 in the Dark Peak area of the Peak District National Park here in the UK.
As always, I’m keen to see any funkiness you can create with Velo Flow so paste a link in the comments of anything cool you come up with.
ScarletFire says:
Hi Ben, with the Cheshire Cat coming up in March, I thought it would be fun to try to VeloFlow the event from last year. http://www.scarletfire.co.uk/2013/01/cheshire-cat-veloflow/
Ben says:
Looks good! Those captions look neater than mine. Have you pointed the Cheshire Cat’s organisers at it? Got to be interesting for them.
ScarletFire says:
Yes, I tweeted it @kilotogo and posted on their fb page. No comments from them 🙁
Duane Jardine says:
Would it be possible to VeloFlow a leader board for a segment?
Ben says:
Hi Duane. I did think about doing this but RaceShape provides a close experience to this as to make it not worth my while coding for it. Check out this comparison of top 10 places on RaceShape: http://bit.ly/VJssDE (you just need to move your mouse over the elevation/time gap profile to animate positions). Maybe worth just asking RaceShape for a play button?
Duane Jardine says:
Yes a play button would be nice there. I have seen a leader board done like veloflow for a segment. That website just doesn’t have the members that Strava has. It is very fun to watch.
Chris Van Der Grift says:
Would love to be able to compare different rides of the same course by being able to set the starting time of multiple rides to ‘0’. So if I rode a certain course twice, one starting at 11am and one at 10am, I could see both dots start at t=0, so I could compare the two rides.
Ben says:
Now that is a great idea. I should be able to do that no matter what happens with the Strava API’s. Do you always ride the EXACT same route? I could try automatically create a collection of rides by looking for the ones with completely matching segments. Otherwise perhaps I can just give you the option to link rides together manually. Might work better for those people that ride in places with very few segments. I’ll add it to the To-Do list so I don’t forget. It’ll be a couple of months before I can look into this in more detail.
Chris Van Der Grift says:
I think being able to list ActivityIDs that you want to compare, or list segmentIDs would work better than trying to match a ride with completely matching segments. Personally, I created a few segments set to private to cover each possible start of my rides (I only needed 5). That way, VeloFlowing one (or more) of those private segments only shows dots for myself. For the comparisons, I would probably select two (or more) activityIDs for identical (or very similar) routes and maybe one of those private segments to only see myself.
Ben says:
leave it with me. I’ll see how I can fit it into the next version of VeloViewer.