Originally Posted by
wphamilton
What I'm thinking, from map data you could find things like stoplights or corners at the bottom of a hill, uncontrolled intersections, volume of cross-traffic, business and residential driveways, correlated with gradient. Possibly detect blind curves, narrow shoulders and on-street parking, lane width.
By analyzing cyclist speed changes and correlating with the above you could maybe detect map points where cyclists tend slow or stop, which could point to traffic tendencies from causes external to the specific route. If you could get traffic data from google (such as the real-time traffic conditions we see on some websites), enough of that data could identify map points with tendencies for high speed, high volume, accidents etc.
From elevation data you could probably flag specific street areas as places where a cyclist could easy generate unsafe speeds. It all depends on the quality and sufficiency of data, how well you could match physical characteristics to patterns, and whether you could mash it all into a meaningful metric for potential danger. I don't know if any of that is feasible, but it seems possible in theory.
It's all very fascinating, but it is far beyond Strava's capabilities. It's a relatively tiny company with a total of 40 employees, 10 or so of them engineers. And I'm not even sure what those are doing, since there are much simpler and straightforward things that are still lacking on the web site despite having been requested by users. For example, you can't enter custom heart rate zones because they couldn't find web developer time to add that function, and you can't upload data to Strava from Garmin "on the trail" devices like Dakota or eTrex, because Strava uses a 2-year-old version of Garmin Communicator API and never got around to upgrading the API. And you expect them to engage in a complex project to quantify and auto-flag risky streets? Maybe Google might have the resources for that, but Strava does not and will not in the foreseeable future.
And even if they could do it. Would that really shield them from lawsuits? Sooner or later someone will die on a segment that has been vetted by the auto-flagger as "safe", and then the victim's family will sue Strava for negligence, claiming that they failed to do their job making sure that the auto-flagger works correctly.