Another forum member guided me to the Strava Global Heatmap showing cycling routes
traveled in my area.
Really helpful stuff.
So, I went out and bought a Garmin Edge 500.
So far, so good.

Question is: if I do not splurge and buy in to the upgraded Strava membership,
will the rides I upload to Strava register and ultimately be depicted on the Heatmap?
I ride a few roads not commonly ridden by cyclists who travel through my area,
and I would like these roads to appear on the map.

How often is the Heatmap updated?
How many rides does it take to get the road on the Heatmap?

Inquiring minds need to know.................

pretty sure they do register. The problem is that if only you ride on those roads, they are not going to be particularly "hot" in comparison to the other roads in your area

Is that to say that the heat signatures are in response to many different riders passing rather
than a single rider passing many times?

Nobody in here knows Strava's algorithm. But it's probably just the number of times an area has been ridden and uploaded.

We have a bike counter on the west span of the Fremont Bridge, and on a typical, not-rainy day, a few thousand cyclists ride over the bridge. Even if you ride these roads you're talking about every day, they're still pretty rarely traveled in the grand scheme of things.

Yes your rides will be part of the global heatmap. So far there was only the initial release of it and one update about a year later (late October / Early November). I see a few features on the heatmap in odd places that I know were the result of a single ride by me. So 1 ride will get a road on the heatmap, but many many rides to make it appear dark whether it be many users or just the same guy over and over. I think there were some glitches when they did the update, because there are a number of blank spots in my region.

Premium will let you generate a personal heatmap. Plus a bunch of other training related features that don't appeal to me. I made a game of the personal heatmap last year trying to fill up as much of it as possible and ended up covering almost the entire city aside from a few expressways and gated crescents.

https://www.strava.com/athletes/1009...750/-104.67773

If you want an overlay of all your rides without paying for premium there are a couple options:
Gamin BaseCamp will let you import all your gpx traces and display them all at once. GPX download from Strava is a premium feature, but I believe anyone has access to bulk download all their traces in a zip file. The base map is useless but you can get an OpenStreetMap with BaseCamp installer from Free worldwide Garmin maps from OpenStreetMap.

Another option is to used this 3rd party Strava utility that reads your rides from Strava and overlays them on a Google Map (Strava Multiple Ride Mapping Tool | Strava Tools). It caches the rides so subsequent runs of the utility are much faster. There are several options for tweaking how the map looks.

Garmin has a heatmap, too, and you don't have to pay.

Where is the Garmin heatmap?

On the Garmin web page (dashboard), drop down "Explore" and then "Routes".

Strava heat map froze around here with all that record low temperatures. I will add little more heat wave there soon. We start getting spring teasers

I'm a Garmin guy, but didn't know you have to pay for stuff in strava. Which one you think is better or more popular? Or we shouldn't compare both, since one is based on one brand equipment, and another can be used with almost anything?

They're not the same thing. Strava is hugely popular, and the social and competitive components are huge factors. Garmin is more akin to RWGPS or MMR in that there is a social and competitive component, but it's not well populated or flushed out.

They'll all do a fine job of tracking your mileage and training.

If you have a Garmin, there's no realson to limit yourself to one. Sync your Garmin account with Strava nd MMR, and upload your rides to RWGPS. You'll very quickly discover which one you like best.

To confirm -- you don't have to pay Strava to view the public heatmap, as demonstrated here. The premium membership is needed only if you want to see a heatmap limited to your personal tracks.