Criteria for a city / town to be added to CS

James:

What is the criteria for a city or town to be listed on CItystrides? I have run entire towns but I suspect they are tooo small to have nodes and therefore be “completable” cities or towns. Case in point is the very small (but near and dear to my heart) easternmost town in the US, Lubec Maine, where I do some of my summertime running.

Thanks for any input or pearls of wisdom you can share on this topic!!

Loving the program - it’s been super helpful on my pandemic quest - to run all of the named streets of my hometown, Portland, Maine. I’m at over 70% now. I’ll add that I have been talking up CityStrides to so many local runners and I know that a number of them have jumped on board. I plan to have the local paper and TV stations mention this once I finish - I’ve created a fundraiser out of it for a local food bank geared at helping kids displaced from their school lunch programs. Raised a fair amount for the Maine Locker Project!!!

Enough rambling. Hoping you can add in Lubec for me!
Greg Lull (CS Subscriber)

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The main criteria is that it exists as a space (with borders, etc.) on OpenStreetMap (OSM). If it exists there and not here, there’s a list somewhere you can add the city to to have it added to City Strides.

If it doesn’t exist on OSM, then someone is going to have to create it (with borders, etc.).

Yeah, @fredrik.coulter is referring to How to help with missing/broken cities/regions as the list of where you can add requests.

I generally approach things at the country level - determine which OSM admin level all the Regions (in the US these are states, other countries can use different names) exist at and then from there, determine which OSM admin level all (most) the Cities exist at.
I can bulk-import a country fairly easily that way. From there, I wait for people to complain. :smile:

The complaints are usually that something is missing. If someone asks for it, I generally add it - I don’t put too much personal preference on it.
This does add the issue of then someone requesting that something be removed - perhaps one person does want a large city broken into its smaller pieces (e.g. Manhattan) and another doesn’t. Oh well, can’t please everyone.
It does also add the issue of “duplicate streets”, where you run one street that exists in two separate cities in CityStrides (again e.g. Manhattan). That street is counted as completed twice for you - once in each city. I need to fix that - I think I’m going to add the ability for me to mark some cities as “child” or “contained” or “partial” (unsure of the name, obviously :laughing:) … this would cause those streets to not be counted in the overall count / challenges / etc, but wouldn’t remove the ability to track your progress within that “child” city.

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