About the Node, Street, and City Data

JamesChevalier · April 5, 2020, 7:25pm

Overview

This Wiki is all about nodes, streets and cities

Note: All of this data comes from OpenStreetMap (OSM). It’s accessed via queries to a Overpass.

Nodes: these are the “atoms” or building blocks of CityStrides. They are the individual points which make up a street.
Streets: streets are essentially collections of nodes, and are the element that Striding is all about! OpenStreetMap itself doesn’t have a concept of “street”. Instead, there are many smaller collections of Nodes that are called Ways. A “street” as we know it may exist in OSM as a single Way record or it may exist as several Way records. This Google Doc - CityStrides Street Query - contains a full list of road types and the full/explained query that CityStrides uses to import data.
Cities: this is the top of the data hierarchy in CityStrides, and is again defined by OSM. Your page will show a completion percentage for every city where you have completed at least one street.

For more information on OpenStreetMap, see About OpenStreetMap

Nodes are inaccessible: see section below
Nodes or street data are incorrect: If there’s something wrong about a Street or its Nodes in CityStrides, then the data should be corrected in OSM. As of April of 2020, I’m still working on a way to update the data in CityStrides with updates from OSM. Once that work is complete, the updates in OSM will make their way into CityStrides.
Multiple streets in a city with the same name appear as one street: OpenStreetMap doesn’t have a concept of “streets”, it only knows about “ways” which are sections of roads. I have to piece these together within CityStrides, and I do that by matching them on their name. If a city has two streets with the same name, CityStrides joins them as one street. I don’t currently have a workaround/fix for this.
Cities are unambiguous: there are multiple overlapping city definitions
City is missing or otherwise incorrect: read or add to this tracker to help fix issues

Nodes: if you run (ie your GPS data has a point that is) within 25m of a node, it is counted as complete. You may capture nodes on streets you weren’t running on, or miss nodes on a street you did run based on this logic
Streets: if you complete 90% of the nodes on a street, the street will be considered complete. For streets with less than 10 nodes, you need to complete every node to complete the street (not enough for you? Check out the “hard mode” discussion for more!)
Cities: the percentage complete of a city is shown below. Discussions have previously arisen considering other completion metrics (like completed nodes/total nodes, or completed distance/total distance, however these are not currently active.

Percentage Complete = Count of Streets Completed in City / Total Count of Streets in City

What about those nodes that are on private property, behind a fence, or in the middle of a building/body of water/other?

There are multiple strategies to deal with these nodes in CityStrides

Correct the data: you can manually edit the underlaying data in OpenStreetMap. (Note that a regular connection between OSM and CityStrides is presently under development)
Ignore the node: the stoic’s approach is to just ignore the fact it’s there and move on (okay, none of us do this, so what else?)
Manually Mark Complete: this feature exists exactly for this reason. The street will be marked complete and you can carry on - you can do this by visiting the Street’s page and clicking the mark as manually complete button
Fabricate the data: manually create a .gpx file with the two required data points, and load it to your Strava (ethically questionable, why not just use the “mark complete” option?)