A cycling obsession: Veloviewer tiles

Trevor Porter

It wasn’t the coloured squares that got me. It was the blank ones.

Looking at my map on Veloviewer for the first time, what struck me wasn’t how much of the local area I’d covered on the bike over the years, but the patches I hadn’t: the top of Loves Farm, Great Paxton, places a few minutes from my own front door that I’d simply never had reason to ride through. That gap between what I assumed I knew and what the map actually showed is, I think, where this whole thing started.

Veloviewer is a website that takes your activity data from Strava and turns it into detailed analytics, charts and diagrams. The part that hooked me is the map overlay: a grid of squares laid across everywhere you’ve ever ridden, walked, run or paddled (Strava counts all of it, hence “activity” rather than “ride” – running included, God forbid). Cross into a square with your GPS track and you’ve “collected” it. Each tile is roughly a mile across, though the GIS nerds among you will already be muttering that they can’t be true squares, and that they shrink the further north you go. True enough. I’ll leave that rabbit hole for you to fall down if you fancy it.

I came across the site at the start of Covid, when it only showed your last 100 rides. I liked the look of it enough to pay the £10 annual subscription, which unlocks your entire Strava history and three main scores: total tiles visited, the biggest square of connected tiles, and the biggest cluster of connected tiles.

Collecting began properly on 15th April 2020. My starting numbers: 3,718 tiles, a max square of 7 x 7 around Bedford, and a max cluster of 404. A month and 16 rides later, I was at 3,780 tiles, a 17 x 17 square and a cluster of 685, and by then I was hooked. Most of those early miles were done on my GT Grade with 35mm tyres, because so many of the local tiles I needed sat up bridleways rather than roads. That’s the strange trade at the heart of tile collecting: you end up riding roads and tracks you’d never otherwise bother with, plenty of which you’ll never ride again once the tile is banked. At first I focused on growing the square, then on filling the gaps between old routes. As the rides got longer and lockdowns came and went, that filling-in spread out to North Norfolk and East Suffolk.

So what makes it so addictive? Partly timing: during Covid, tile hunting gave me something to chase when we were all confined close to home. Partly temperament: I love maps, and planning a route to sweep up every possible tile without missing one, and then riding 60-odd miles only to find you’ve missed one anyway, is a very particular kind of frustration I apparently enjoy inflicting on myself. Partly just human nature: I suspect everyone is a collector of something, and a set of virtual squares covering the world is a fairly harmless outlet for it. And partly competition. Veloviewer runs leaderboards, and once I’d set my sights on the world top 250 for max square, and later did the same for max cluster, there was no pretending this was just a mild interest any more.

There’s a simpler pleasure in it too: riding roads and tracks you’d never otherwise have a reason to explore. Rutland, North Norfolk, the bridleways around Hitchin, stretches that follow the line of old Roman roads. All genuine highlights. I’m less sentimental about certain corners of Corby, Peterborough and Northampton, and I can’t say I’m sorry those particular tiles are already ticked off.

The obsessive streak shows itself in odd ways. A single tile stranded in the middle of an otherwise solid cluster can needle me for weeks, and yes, I have ridden eighty miles to mop up one lonely square. The last couple of years have mostly been about growing that cluster rather than the square. As I write this, I’m sitting on 8,152 tiles, a max square of 55 x 55 (168th on the world leaderboard) and a max cluster of 5,001 (250th).

This year’s targets: push the square to 57 x 57, and hang on to a top-250 place for the cluster.

If you decide to give tile collecting a go yourself, I take no responsibility for any addiction or injuries that follow.

Further reading, if you want to go down the same hole I did:

A few practical notes

Some tiles are simply unreachable – airbases and the like.

For context, the current leaderboard leaders sit at: 92,721 total tiles, a max square of 174 x 174, and a max cluster of 46,436. Plenty of road left for anyone starting.

Two tools worth knowing about: the Veloviewer extension for Strava, which overlays your tiles onto the Strava route builder for planning; and Explorer Helper, a phone app that’s excellent for checking on the road whether you’ve actually made it into a tile.