The weekend comes, and there’s an urge to shake up your routine. It’s time to take a long run or ride to new places. That often takes tinkering on a map and can eat into riding time if you haven’t planned ahead.

Then comes the urge to just wing it, which can be fun — unless you end up riding down sketchy road shoulders, cursing yourself with every passing car.

Strava’s latest suite of updates includes route suggestions based on paths worn by its users. In effect, you can crowdsource new route suggestions — complete with a café stop at the halfway mark. If you’re still in the mood to trailblaze, more power to you. Maybe you’ll end up creating a new segment and become its leader.

Strava continues to use artificial intelligence to bolster its existing features. The biggest updates come to the app’s Routes. Here, AI leans on the data created by its more than 150 million athlete users in over 185 countries.

How does AI know what route you might like? It finds routes popular among other users based on activity type. It’s not unlike song recommendations on music apps.

As you’ll see, these improved Routes have a trickle-down effect, informing other features that will roll out this summer.

2025 Strava Updates: Crowdsourced Wayfinding

AI-Powered Routes

As mentioned above, Strava has updated its Routes experience with help from AI. Under the Maps tab, Routes generates suggestions based on its community-backed routes. It uses the app’s Global Heatmap to share or find new places to run, ride, or walk from their current location.

We can see where the machine could eventually weigh its recommendations based on users with similar performance data. However, that is wholly speculative on our part.

Tappable Points of Interest

Riding out to the nearest scenic overlook is cool, but Strava’s Points of Interest includes some more practical locations. After all, cycling and cafés are practically synonymous. And every athlete has felt the sudden urge to find the nearest restroom.

In June, subscribers can tap to find this information and have Strava generate a direct or scenic route there. These routes will include details like elevation, distance, and estimated time to arrival. The app’s Maps tab will also include community-provided photos.

Point-to-Point Routing

Strava combines its new Routes engine with info from its Global Heatmap to create the most efficient, activity-specific route to get from one spot to the next. Come July, users can simply drop a pin and go with point-to-point routing on mobile.

Fair PRs & Leaderboards

People cheat at board games, so it should never be a surprise that people will cheat to get atop Strava’s local leaderboard. Personal records and Leaderboards are a big part of the app’s experience for some athletes. Thus, the company has taken several measures to maintain their integrity.

In February, Strava began using its machine-learning models to flag suspicious activities that were incorrectly tagged. For instance, a ride that was recorded as a run, or any activity that involved a vehicle. In many cases, users forget to stop recording an effort and start to drive home. Strava detects such bad data (not cheating) and has users trim their activity.

New updates continue its efforts for accurate PRs and leaderboards.

Fair Leaderboards

As part of Strava’s ongoing efforts to uphold fair and legitimate leaderboards, the company is continuing to advance the application of its machine-learning model to police its top 10 spots on ride and run leaderboards.

Strava reports that this effort “has removed 4.45 million activities with the wrong sport type or recorded in vehicles so far, helping to rightfully restore KOMs and QOMs to reflect true performances.”

Building off these efforts, Strava is making more updates to increase confidence in its leaderboards. It’s also expanding oversight across even more live segments. Subscribers can discover and compete on these new live segments with new features like extra screens with comparison metrics.

2024 Strava Updates Now Active

If you haven’t caught up on Strava’s features recently, know that you may be sleeping on quite a few recent updates.

Last year, we reported on several soft-launched features released during Camp Strava. Among those were the much-requested Dark Mode to kill the screen brightness at night, and the AI-based coaching feature dubbed Athlete Intelligence that provides feedback after a recorded ride, run, or effort. Athlete Intelligence has since made it out of beta after positive feedback from users.

Night Heat Maps created a database of popular routes after dark. While day maps often lead to parks or water-side routes, that changes at night when safety and visibility are a higher concern. This feature can be accessed as a layer in the Maps tab.

The Dubai Roads and Transport Authority (RTA) is showcasing five of its cutting-edge tech innovations at GITEX EUROPE x Ai Everything 2025, a three-day tech and startup event taking place in Berlin, Germany.

The global event, which kicked off on May 21, is getting to witness RTA’s AI-powered traffic flow optimisation, palm vein payment, flying taxi, interactive kiosks, and the initiative to enhance pedestrian and cyclist experience.

“We have made sure to showcase these and let the people in Berlin and Europe see the benchmark and see how RTA is doing it in Dubai,” Salahaldeen Almarzooqi, director of technology governance strategy of the corporate technology support services sector at RTA, told Khaleej Times.

While these projects are already announced in the UAE and are in the process of being implemented, Dubai aims to garner a wider reach through GITEX EUROPE that has exhibitors from over 100 countries. 

 Palm payment in final stages

The RTA director said the groundbreaking palm vein payment initiative is “in the final stages of proof of concept”, adding as “this technology needs to be reliable no matter what the circumstances, there has to be 5,000 case studies to test the new technology”.

“If people come with any injury or with henna for example, [we] have to make sure that it’s all tested [so that it’s accurate].”

Almarzooqi added, “The plan is to move it to pilot stage and by end of next year, we will start rolling out into the public transportation media”.

Enhancing pedestrian and cyclist experience initiative

The initiative essentially includes a “smart” pole that includes a canopy, seating, USB ports, camera, air pump, as well as other basic maintenance tools for cyclist.

Managing traffic with AI

In February, RTA had announced to leverage AI to gather real-time data on congestion due to traffic lights.

“Recently, we started deploying a new traffic management system based completely on an AI algorithm that monitors the traffic situation using multiple inputs, like cameras, sensors, and takes the real-time decision towards extending the green light and managing the traffic on the intersections,” he said. 

“It was for the first time in the region that we are deploying a smart fusion system for traffic that is aimed to reduce the traffic by 15 per cent to 20 per cent.”

In Berlin, RTA showcased this technology in a bid to set a “benchmark” so that Europe can “learn from those opportunities,” Almarzooqi said.

Within the upcoming year or the year after, we’re going to complete the migration of around 600 intersections from the existing system to the new AI-based system, he added.

Interactive kiosks

RTA’s smart kiosks provides various digital services related to vehicle licencing, drivers, parking, nol, and revenue management services (licencing, sales invoice, etc. The services are seamless and are availanble round the clock.

Hind Aldah

Hind Aldah covers business, tech, crypto and all that jazz for a younger audience. In her spare time…More