Better Data Is On The Way

There’s a new system behind the scenes that imports all streets for all cities in a given country. Many of you have helped collect the details required to make this happen. There is still some expansion possible, if you would like to help out.
There’s a lot that is going to change, but very little of it is obvious by browsing the site. I also don’t want to surprise you by having your percentages change without knowing why. I’ll explain everything I can here, but if you still have questions please ask in the Support forum.

More Cities

We’re about to get way better coverage around the world. Another 50k cities are coming to CityStrides. The underlying system will also allow much easier expansion around the world.

Cleaner Street Data

One of the biggest issues in CityStrides has been the bad street data. Buildings, lakes, rivers, railroads - none of these are streets. The new data set completely cleans up this data, and removes the need for the Flagged Street system.

Contribute Back To The Mapping Community

OpenStreetMap is the source of data for CityStrides. If there’s anything incorrect/missing in CityStrides, we can fix that in OpenStreetMap. This way, the entire world benefits from our work.

Getting From Here To There

You will notice your progress percentages change when we switch over to the new data. This is because the underlying street/node data is being updated. The new percentages should be way more accurate.

If you notice missing cities or streets, please share this in the Support category in the forum. We’ll have to work together to update OpenStreetMap with more complete/accurate data.

The Cost Of This Project

It looks like the project will cost me about $750 to complete. These expenses come from:

  • A large temporary database server

  • A permanent Overpass server

  • Four large temporary data processing servers

So the good news here is that most of this is a one-off cost. There’s only a little increase to the monthly operating costs. Unfortunately, this is all going onto my credit card as a personal expense.

If you love CityStrides, and have the means, it would be extremely helpful if you can Become A Supporter.

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Thanks for this update, I’m looking forward to the cleaner maps!
Do you have a rough idea how long the process will take?

I started this project on the 6th. I’m hoping to have this finished this week.

There are still 150 users to process against the new city data - I have a separate set of database tables for the new data & I had to reprocess all ~6 million activities against it. I’m hoping that finishes today. After that, I’m going to reprocess all the activities between the 6th and today (or whenever that finishes). Then I can go live with the new data!

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Wow, that’s a lot of number-crunching!

colbert-calculator

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wow, sounds awfully good. I am very excited to see how the new data matches my walks/runs

OMG: WOW! that is serious sh*t, man. Impressive and i think you are entitled to call it citystrides 2.0 after the go-live! (or i that sooo 2015?) I can’t wait to see how the personal lifemap will look and my completed cities will stil lbe 100% after that.

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You have no idea how excited I am for this update.
Looking forward to seeing the results!!!

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I’m also looking forward to this update. I do have one concern though. What about trails? I’m specifically thinking about the trails in the White Mountains of NH. Pretty much every trail up there is listed as a “street”. Sometimes I use CityStrides to plan hikes on trails I’ve never been on before. A lot of the “towns” up there consist mostly of just trails. I would hate to see those, and trails elsewhere, disappear.

This is awesome, thanks James!

Trails won’t initially be present in this list.

I’m thinking of doing another round of data import to a new Trail data type. I’ve heard of a number of people who use CityStrides for trail running as well, but I think it should be a different percentage. I’m picturing another tab next to Striders and Streets to list all the Trails.

Please continue this conversation over in Add hiking trails :+1:
(If you want to talk about parks, please discuss that in Greenways and Parks :+1: )

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Is this why Sync Now has disappeared, or am I missing something?

Thanks,
Duncan

Not exactly (but it does help me out right now) … It’s temporarily disabled because of Strava API limit issues. From Report Synchronization Issues Here :

Ummm @JamesChevalier looks like my pre-update coverage of Brooklyn has gone from 58.5% to 0.0%.

None of my runs seem to count anymore? :thinking:

I wanted to be “winning” CityStrides, even if only for a few moments. So I reset everyone except me to 0%.

Yeah.

That’s it.

I didn’t forget about an entire step in my plan.

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WHOAH, it’s happening! :star_struck::crazy_face::open_mouth: the citystrides 2.0 is in progress! all routes and percentages newly calculated and the city borders visible in my region. (shame i am almost finished completely in my region, but let’s see what i have missed, using the new calculations)

one thing: the nodehunter on the desktop can now only do so much, with the 10 nodes limit. Because every street seems to explode with nodes now, it’s very limited in the use. Maybe set the limit to 5000 or 10000?

Can’t wait to see the result tomorrow morning!

Compliments @JamesChevalier for putting in the effort in a clean and realtime citystrides.

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Hi James, WoW this is great. I gained about 4% coverage which is quite a lot. Finally over 50%.
Had to cancel subscription temporarily but will surely subscribe again soon.

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Hi, last week I ran a route in my city (Brighton, UK) that was quite new to me( Chris Keene's Activity on September 16, 2019 - CityStrides ). I wondered how much of the city I had covered in my years running, and if there was a way to track it.

A quick google and of course someone had already solves this, what impresses my so much is how well this has been implemented, this is such a great site. And from a technical perspective, I can see how what might seem, on first glance, a simple challenge, merge all strava runs together, is actually a vast processing nightmare!

In the last week, I have subscribed (only a couple of dollars a month, sorry) and fixed a few things on open street map. At the moment various rail lines and shops show up as roads and it will be great to see how this improves.

I think much of my running history is in the queue due to the strave api limits but that’s not a problem.
Just wanted to say thank you.
Chris

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