Zwift Charts: Rate of New Road Construction from 2015 to Present

Longtime Zwifter and Zwift Insider reader Spencer Jones recently messaged me with an interesting chart he’d put together. And it was no small task!

Spencer says, “Using your website, I pieced together what I think are all of the Zwift releases of roads and plotted vs time.” I double-checked Spencer’s work, and it was quite thorough. There were a couple of Zwift construction project data points that needed to be tweaked a bit, but overall, he did the heavy lifting.

Here’s the final chart:

Zwift Road Construction Timeline

A few notes:

• Each point includes a letter denoting which map the roads were added to. Mouse over that letter for a note explaining what was added.
• Technically, the first data point should be reduced by around 4.7km, since Watopia replaced Jarvis when it launched.
• We know of at least one world, Gravel Mountain, that was created but never released to the public. This world is not included in the chart.
• The 2020 Richmond point is for the Richmond Refresh. In one sense this didn’t add new roads to the map, but in another sense it did, as it let us ride the existing roads in both directions instead of just one way.
• The 2023 Repack Rush point is interesting, because it’s the only time when the total length of roads decreased, since Repack Rush replaced the slightly longer Repack Ridge.

Tracking the Trends

Looking at the chart, you can easily see there have been a few instances where there were sizeable time gaps between new road releases.

But what’s more interesting is the distinct falloff in construction rates. From the launch of Watopia in early 2015 to the launch of Neokyo in late 2021, Zwift averaged ~49.3km of new roads added per year. But since then, Zwift has averaged just 21.6km of annual construction.

(In fairness to Zwift, the chart above doesn’t include Climb Portals, and Zwift has launched over 420km worth of Climbs via this feature since mid-2023. I’ll do a separate post charting the growth of the Portal library.)

Your Thoughts

What do you think of Zwift’s new road release rate? Should they invest more heavily into new roads, or should they invest elsewhere since we have enough roads to comfortably hold our community’s interest and avoid overcrowding?

If you’re a “more new roads” proponent, what would you like to see built?

Share your thoughts in the comments below!