Sunday Times: Strava records achieved by speeding and ignoring red lights

Strava is dead and buried. It was a good idea to start with but now all it does is ruin a good ride. Had to flag a segment today that went through a small village with a narrow main street, primary school and max speed limit of 20mph. KOM (that's a joke for a start) was just under 29mph. If the cops wanted to up their weekly stats they could just go through segments like this and nick the top 10.

Short segments in the middle of cities are not the kind of thing strava was aiming at really, I am sure most folk are interested in a proper decent hill climb challenge or long rolling sections rather than gimmicky londoncentric commuter sprints.

The KOMs on the vast majority of sections is under the speed limit. It's also massively time dependant. Many roads are empty out of rush hour of over Christmas. Set a couple of KOMs I can't hope to match when there is traffic on the road or people using crossings. I did nothing illegal at the time. People are responsible for their own behaviour on the roads.

Sensationalist tabloid article - a shame as I expect better from the Times. Whilst I wouldn't necessarily accuse the article of being one sided (interviewed @veloviewer for some balance), it did fail to mention some important points. Some of the following were briefly alluded to, some ignored: 1) it is not illegal in the UK for a bicycle to break a speed limit - they apply in law only to motor vehicles (although there are offences peculiar to bicycles which MAY be committed in specific circumstances). 2) There are a lot of cheats on Strava who record times in a car or motorbike / scooter, maybe even an ebike and so an AVERAGE segment speed of 41 mph is highly unlikely to be a genuine one. 3) As @VeloViewer tried to point out, even if that rider wasn't cheating it is very unlikely to be an accurate representation of his ride for technical reasons relating to GPS and strava's algorithms, more like 31mph. 4) It's clearly not in the spirit of Strava to create time trial segments on crowded and dangerous city centre streets - hence "King of the MOUNTAIN", but the onus for creating safe sensible segments lies with users and the terms and conditions of Strava, which every user agrees to, places responsibility for safety firmly with the user. 5) Cycling club time trials, where every second counts, and indeed many categorised cycling races (actual official RACES) are held on public roads open to traffic because of outdated laws relating to bicycle racing (you'll never find it hard to locate a close roads running event going on somewhere in the UK!) - its a shame the article didn't call for more opportunity for safe closed road events on a larger scale. 6) Strava does allow for reporting of segments considered as dangerous. To summarise my position - it's down to an individual user to create segments safely, for example, not ones that end just the other side of a traffic light controlled junction or that feature roundabouts etc. Segments should really be all about climbing - certainly the only ones I care very much about involve upward gradients. If you're riding a segment to try and move up the board or take a KOM and it goes through a set of lights, then if you get green - happy days, if you don't - bad luck, try another day! It's not worth risking your safey and that of others for an electronic honour only you and maybe 3 or 4 other people at the top of the leader board care about at all!

The figures mentioned by the times are not even actual speeds, they are glitches due to recording via a smartphone: This is the segment they are referring to and if you look at the rides for the respective people you can see how the numbers reported for this incredibly short segment are simply gps recording errors, which are more likely when using a smartphone!

The segment for anyone interested is http://app.strava.com/segments/1080956

You only have to go down to about tenth position for it to be times that would be within the speed limit ± 10%

That's the trouble with any recording instrument, it is never the true speed, but a recording of it which is only as good as the instrument you are recording with.

Yes but some of the recorded speeds are set by people in or on motor vehicles breaking the speed limit. One of my local hills has an average uphill speed of 53.9kph fair play to them if they did it but I’m not so sure. The trouble is there are plenty of twats in all walks of life who break the law and they can not moan if they get caught.