With the addition of three simple new “connector” road - the options for new routes become exponentially expanded! Zwift HQ - implementing these 3 new additions gives your graphics/software team the most ‘bang for the development buck’. Mockup image attached.
Don’t you think ZHQ already has multiple plans for new roads in development, and likely a 5 to 10 year plan? Sorry, but I doubt they are waiting for you or anyone else to come up with ideas. It’s fun to dream though isn’t it.
Point taken – however, Zwift reported $103 million in revenue for 2023 and (approx.) 121 million for 2024 - yet, despite strong revenue growth, these guys are still not profitable and continue to lose money. Even high-level financial analyses seem to suggest that Zwift’s expenses significantly exceed its revenue. One breakdown suggests annual costs could be as high as $240 million, leaving a gap of at least $120 million per year - implying Zwift is burning through at least $10 million per month. So, while I theoretically agree with your assertion on planning – if I were Eric Min, I would be looking for all the customer input I can get – and Zwift forums is a great place to start!
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Hi @Stan_Yeatts,
Welcome back to the Forums! I am Nelson from Zwift Support.
Thanks so much for sharing your thoughts about connecting routes in Watopia. The image is amazing. We’re always thrilled to hear from Zwifters like you—your ideas and feedback help make this community special.
I love your suggestion and have passed it along to the proper team.
If you need any assistance, just contact us at Zwift Support, and we will be there for you.
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Could you remove some of the current connectors, like the one at the Esses bridge and the one half-way up the hilly kom? I find them distracting and pointless. New roads are always welcome, but not simply to add ‘routes’ that are just the same roads with a slightly different spin on them.
100% no. There are some terrific race routes through those bypasses, and they’re significantly different than not having the bypasses. I don’t understand why you want to take things away.
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That’d be one way to piss off the community lol; start stripping routes like they strip bikes and kits etc.
A road that is used is hardly “useless.”
Perhaps… less travelled 
Both of those cuts Zee mentions though for the record are used by 2024 Zwift Games Epic.
What’s pointless is the spurs with construction stuff that sit for 2+ years or beyond.
But I would also argue; it’s not us [the user’s] fault that certain roads are rarely used due to the lack of route options.
It’s very easy to add another 20+ unique and interesting routes between Tempus and Jarvis alone with the roads that exist… but, apparently the only way to do that now is ZRL host a competition.
I’m assuming however, the reason why ZHQ doesn’t pump out routes on the weekly as they could, is because then the list of routes would be out of control and “un-sortable.”
At some point in time ZHQ may have to come up with a better way to identify routes by map area.
I do get the point about adding really new roads, but removing things, no - that just makes people upset.
I hold out hope for some more big HC climbs to connect to ADZ, but doubt it will happen.
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Great idea!
How about a few connectors on the alp so you can go straight from 18 to 16 or maybe 3 straight up to 1, and definitely 13 cut around 11 and 9 and connect to 7. Very steep but shorter. Genius!
I didn’t say ‘useless’ maybe ‘pointless’.
The little short-cuts could be gravel - on some of those climbs IRL you do see little rocky gravel paths between one section of road and the next higher bit, or if not that stairs (when the road sections are one beside the other).
You also see some frankly crazy downhill MTB tracks as well, not that those are much use for Zwift because you just bomb downhill at 90km/h with no steering, no brakes and no worries. IRL it’s mad to see them fly down those! Then they go crawl uphill to the top on the road and do it again. 
It would be great to have the alternative climb routes that Alpe D’Huez has in real life for ADZ and then the top of ADZ becomes its own little town that could even be a small circuit for racing.
Others have proposed this a number of times.
When I went to ride SOTR in Virginia not that long ago I met a local who, after having a conversation with where a good road was to do some prior riding, got into a discussion of his ride for the day of that event…
What this guy did was almost brilliant, as said, local, done the ride before, wanted to make things interesting. So he … made his own route (this event wasn’t huge, few hundred people tops), a good 60-70% gravel, and set it up so he’d hit a majority of the rest stops as well (nobody freak out, he did pay to do the ride, but only in support for the local community).
SOTR’s main identity is climbing a tiny portion of Blue Ridge Parkway, specifically… Thunder Ridge, what he did however was just cut through it and hit all of the gravel fire roads surrounding the area.
Frankly, I thought it was genius; local bored of a local town event, want to support it, but also hit up some super unique roads and also get to use the resupply stations???
Zwift lacks gravel roads, and it’s a shame because they’re as interesting as any hand-created road on Zwift is because… gasp, it’s the same thing!
People may say they hate Jungle, but if ZHQ slapped gravel time on MTBs and gravel frames for upgrades for the new halo bikes as an additional option… they would see far more action.
Gravel “sucks” on Zwift because there’s so little of it, and even less incentive to ride on it; insteady ZHQ continues to incintivize distance in a raw form, and pure time.
All they need is a little more creativity on a whiteboard or in their video calls.
All of that to say from a personal level, what that local guy did that I met in Virginia, to make his own gravel route that hit a few portions of the main route, was creative and fun.
A few weeks ago, I had a teammate going up the Mayan KOMs as I was on the coastline road, and said “bet you can’t catch me at the bottom of The Grade.”… joke was on me, because he absolutely did. But moments like that are uncommon due to lack of converging roads.
Why is that a weird thing to mention here? Because I surprisingly ran into that same local I spoke to the day before SOTR, at the second stop during the event, which was absolutely wild to me, in a “what were the chances of that happening?” kind of way.
There are a lot of bypasses and simple connections that could be made in Watopia, that would require far less work than what’s involved in creating an entirely new world that ends up being shelved for years at a time.
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