If you have an area with perpendicular streets that only have nodes at the ends, do you go for the nodes without necessarily running on the street itself (A) or you have to run on the street for it to be “legit” (B)?
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For me, and i guess a lot runners here, the lifemap is leading, so only only variant B counts (for me). If I miss one of those inbetween streets in your example (yes, sometimes it happens), I plan a new run to cover it on the lifemap with a gps string soon.
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I’m with Patrick on this. I run the entirety of every street to consider it ‘complete’ rather than just hitting all of that street’s nodes.
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The OCD in me has to agree with B as well. If I leave a white line on my map, I have to go back!
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Fine, I’ll be the one. I go for the nodes first, at least when designing my route. But if it’s ‘my’ city, I will definitely go back later on a different route to fill in the gaps. But in your example, I would do neither A nor B, but a C. serpentine route
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B - I’m going for all streets. I tend to try to do figure eights to make things more efficient.
Edit: Which is what I think @kevincharlespels meant by “serpentine route.”
Definitely ’B’, I’m horrified and appalled at the idea that ‘A’ could be seen as a legitimate way to complete a city!
I mean, it’s ‘run all the streets’ right? Not ‘hit all the nodes’!
The nodes are, after all, arbitrary features that simply serve to populate the map with enough data to all people this sort of website to exist. The streets are ‘real’, the nodes are abstract.
I’m sure OP didn’t mean it this way, but deliberately employing ‘A’ to complete a city quicker is essentially ‘cheating’ as far as I’m concerned.
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What is ‘cheating’ in CityStrides? There’s no prizes or even badges (yet), just an arbitrary ranking of users who’ve run streets that range from two to hundreds of nodes. I love looking at my LifeMap and I’m proud of it but personally I really don’t care if someone else ran every single named alleyway or small connecting road. What impresses me is how much new turf they cover and how ambitious they are. Frankly, even though I don’t live in Brookline, MA anymore, I won’t be going to great pains to run Smythe St or the small connector I missed on Upland Rd to ‘legitimize’ my 100%. I wasn’t ‘cheating’ when I completed all the nodes on either side of them, I was just enjoying exploring the town I lived in. If someone else doesn’t feel right about not running those streets and wants to do it, more power to them and their own philosophy.
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I realise my (slightly tongue in cheek) tone can’t really translate to a text forum, so please be reassured, I wasn’t intending to be taken absolutely seriously.
From your comment, it sounds like you missed Smythe Street inadvertently, and given that you’re no longer local, I can understand your lack of enthusiasm for going back to fill it in!
However, that wasn’t really the point I was getting at.
What I was criticising was a deliberate attempt by a (hypothetical) user, to deliberately hit as many nodes as possible, whilst minimising the number of actual streets covered.
Surely that’s not controversial?
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I often do similar. And then on a later run, fill in the missing ‘sides of the ladder’.
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I whiffed on interpreting your tone, but I do think it’s an interesting debate! I’m clearly in the minority on this particular issue regardless, but I love thinking about the philosophy of what Citystrides ‘is’ beyond a website.
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I’ll fully admit that I go for A currently, as a pretty lazy/slow runner seeing ‘x streets completed’ (which is based on nodes) after each run is the thing that keeps me moving. I can imagine that once my running becomes easier and more consistent, I will fill in the nodeless streets but that probably won’t happen until I’m around 50%+ of my city (16% right now)
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Definitely B for me! But there are two takes on this: I must run all streets, regardless of what Citystrides say, and I mean I must run the whole length of it even if CS says Completed after 95%. And I must cover every node - even if I ran a street but the GPS was off rack, leaving a red node, I have to go back and try again! OCD?
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As an amusing aside, I’ve been fixing the GPS drift on a few of my runs each day because the GPS accuracy in my city is a mess. Doing so has revealed that I had inadvertently ‘completed’ a few small side streets that I never actually visited, which since I’ve fixed the GPS trace are now incomplete and I need to go back to get them 
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B for me as well. I don’t think there’s a “right” way of doing things, but just nodes seems even more pointless than the already pretty arbitrary goal of running all streets since you don’t even end up with an impressive map to show off.
MinMax might make for a fun challenge though: complete every street in the city with the lowest mileage possible.
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This is the bane of my life too!
There are quite a few narrow ‘lanes’ in the centre of Glasgow that run between fairly tall buildings, getting an accurate go’s trace there is tricky.
Also, the twisty and narrow streets in the mire medieval (layout) parts of London, or around the skyscrapers of Canary Wharf/The City, are a PITA for GPS accuracy.
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I live in a dense urban neighborhood and the GPS trace almost always shows me >20m off the road, in the middle of a building or behind it on an entirely different street. Then, if I want to run in Lisbon’s wonderful urban forest park, I have to traverse a tunnel where the GPS has no signal at all, frequently creating massive ugly straight lines nowhere near my path that mar my lifemap… 
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But @kevincharlespels the real question is, if you found yourself back in Brookline, would you go after Smythe St.? That’s how I’m approaching things. I’ve (had) credit for a street or two, I didn’t actually run, but when back, I did go after them.
Totally agree with your point of view though. I too am doing this for me.
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Good point @hans1 , there’s also the concept of “all the nodes.” I always thought that might be a good stat to determine who finished a city “more better”!
I do try for all the nodes, for my own satisfaction.
This.
I am not saying I would lose sleep over it, but if I ever found myself in that neighborhood again going for a run, that run would HAVE to include those missed sections to fill in all the purple lines.
I live kind of out in the country outside a medium-sized city, so filling in purple lines is sometimes all I have since many of my local roads don’t reside in any “city”
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