woodcraft

Haven't really looked, but Saturday's ride had one 26 miles.

atwl77

Over here, I have seen people create segments out of popular ride routes, as well as entire events (e.g. sportives, charity rides, etc). For example this one:
https://www.strava.com/segments/10521886

...also the same route but also going back the way we came:
https://www.strava.com/segments/11898408

And those aren't the longest ones I've seen. People have made an entire audax brevet route a single segment, and those are at least 200km, if not significantly more.

chaadster

Machka 

I have a QOM on one that's 58.8 km long.

rubiksoval

I've seen a metric century as a segment a few times. There's also a popular century ride that has its own segment.

noisebeam

We have a few longer ones in town here from 10 to 30 miles. They have more traffic lights than miles so the game for them is not speed, but luck and learning the lights. The mile block intersections are usually timed for traffic and may change timing depending on time of day or get adjusted on occasion, but the mid-block intersections are triggered by cross traffic so that is where luck comes into play.

mstateglfr 

My gps(lezyne super gps) uploads to Strava, so I have to have an account.
I finally looked at it for the 2nd time ever as i just want to track overall miles each year.

oh my goodness I chuckled multiple times at how absurd it was.
I did a mixed surface ride-35mi total with half pavement and half gravel and 1600' of climb.
I mention this because Strava declared i had completed about 14 segments with half on pavement and half on gravel.
Some of the pavement segments were .2mi long from a totally unimportant part of a road to another totally unimportant part of a road.
None were over 1.5mi long.

its just so arbitrary.

I did understand why sone segments exist. Funny enough, the gravel segments made sense as they were from an intersection to another intersection. Or they were from a road crossing up to the top of a hill.

the pavement segments were just dumb. Funny dumb, but still dumb.

I wpuld love to see 4+mi segments. Thatd be neat. Sustained effort and whatnot.

Caliper

The segments are all there because some Strava user made them. Anyone who rides a given stretch of road can make a segment there and make it as long or as short as they want. I've made a bunch over my favorite rides. They are like you describe: a memorable hill climb/descent, or a longer stretch either flat or rollers. If you want more 4+ mi segments, make them!

But, I agree, what is it that inspires people to make any tiny little sprint into a segment? more KOM chances? Whatever they like, I guess. I go and hide most of these little things since they clog up my screen when I ride certain areas. I've only made one very short segment that I can recall; it is on a particular turn at the bottom of a hill, on gravel. I wanted to see how fast the cool kids take that because I absolutely suck at cornering on anything loose.

noisebeam

Strava also used to or or maybe still does auto generate segments.

jeffreythree

There used to be a 74 mile segment around here, but looks like it is gone now. Only 2 people ever road it. A couple of 12-20 miles long out and backs that end in parking lots and have random turn around points did not make much sense until I realized it was triathletes. All of them are close to the local natatorium.

CliffordK

Since I'm usually off on my own, I regularly alter my routes (or miss a turn, or add a rest stop, or something).

I'll probably create a few long segments if I can make some of general interest. For example, I'll eventually make the Willamette Valley Scenic Bikeway into a 130+ mile segment, each direction. The problem is that I usually take a few shortcuts, in part because I have about 50 more miles of riding at the ends of the route, and it just puts me over the top for daily riding.

One of my other issues is getting my "longest climb" stats up.

So, if I can ever get my miles up, I have a route planned to take me from about 400 feet to about 7800 feet. Perhaps you'll call foul, but it is a grueling route that takes me over 150 miles and a bunch of climbing (> 13,000 feet climbing total, to just get credit for the 7700 feet climb)

And, as I understand it, the only way to get the climbing to count is to define it as a long segment.

https://www.strava.com/routes/6229282

Unfortunately, the first time I did the ride, I was carrying too much cargo and came up a little bit short.

Plus, I've made some changes since the initial route planning. For example, I bumped into a bike path I wasn't aware of. So, I have to get my route reasonably well designed before crystallizing it.

Caliper

I didn't know this. How does it generate the name? Some segment names are very interesting/silly while mine are just descriptive...

caloso

I have one that's 21.8 miles (35km). It's an out and back on a route I ride all the time and like to use it as a measuring stick.

kbarch

Pardon the humblebragging (more like proud self-deprecation given the mostly lame positions behind the leader on prestige courses) but...
VeloViewer indicates the longest "segment" I've recorded was most of the local Gran Fondo course, and many of the other longest ones are big chunks of the same or similar ones.


About the next to the last one there, no, I didn't ride the Maratona, we just happened to ride some of the same roads once. But about that one, I was surprised to see how many more places there were on that segment, so I went to see what the most popular segments I've ridden were that were more than five miles long, and this is what came up:



OK, so a Central Park loop, one would expect to be more populated than some road used for a sportive up in the mountains, but HOLY CRAP! - over 36,000 places at some other segment up in the Dolomites! I think it may also be part of the course for the Maratona, but I wonder why it has almost twice as many places....

Anyhow just for kicks, and to demonstrate my love for VeloViewer - the steepest that were more than five miles long: