Strava segments by year

I thought I’d do a little analysis of the data I’m slowly collecting on my Strava segment explorer. Every segment has a numeric ID and these started at 1* and each new segment gets an ID of one greater than the most recent segment. So it’s quite easy to figure out how many segments are getting created over time.
So since I don’t have a huge dataset to analyse, lets see how many segments had been created at the end of every year.

So what’s this tell us? It shows the total number of segments created at the end of every year and it looks like since 2011, the number of segments created every year has remained fairly constant. I guess the interesting question would be whether creation of segments can be used as some kind of proxy for usage of Strava since Strava keep this information confidential? I think the answer to that is probably no. A new user in an area already choc full of segments probably isn’t going to feel the need to create more, although they may create a few personal ones (home to work etc). Long term users probably already have all the segments they need. A better approach would be to repeat this study from last year.
But I guess it does show Strava is still being actively used by its users, beyond that it’s hard to say anything definitive.
*Not entirely true, the lowest ID I’ve found is 96, but I imagine the ID of the first segment ever created was 1.