In the process this year of aiming to walk all the streets of Corvallis, Oregon, USA, I keep having a few things reoccur that I wish I could make public notes of…
Unique fun/interesting/different thing I encounter - like the 9’ tall unicorn sculpture I ran into in the middle of an utterly normal residential area. If you’re walking this area, you really want to check this out.
Sources of water in case you need to refill the water bottle. Today I found a faucet in a cemetery that did the job, and figure others might want to know about it.
Streets that aren’t accessible as they are actually private. Today I ran into a completely fenced off, no longer accessible small unfinished housing area with a street inside that was in the system. I can go into OpenStreetMap and mark it as such, but wish I could just mark it as not accessible. I marked it as manually complete, but wish I could have tagged it as manually completed because not accessible.
Variant on above - allow people to tag common reasons they mark something as manually completed - such as inaccessible, tracker died, etc. I don’t even know what other reasons there might be but the information could be useful for others.
In my opinion these seem like changes to make in OpenStreetMap (OSM) instead of CityStrides (CS). That way more than the CS community benefits from them. Re-creating/duplicating OSM, Google Maps and a little bit of Yelp (for the points of interest) data/features only into CS would only benefit a small (yet energetic) few.
For example, Corvallis currently has 64 users registered in CS. Adding that unicorn sculpture in CS would maybe be seen by that many users if each user reviewed their lifemap before planning their activities. Adding it to OSM, Google Maps and/or Yelp though would benefit the much larger communities those platforms have and any platforms that ingest data from those larger platforms.
I’m not sure how this would be beneficial as once it’s marked in OSM as not accessible, the next time CityStrides processes the city, it will disappear completely from the list of streets. So any tag (from point 4) would disappear too and not be visible to anyone.
You can add notes to each activity on CS. Might be good for personal notes, but unless they can be searched, not sure if it would be very useful. Option is available on each activity:
