Custom "city" areas

[apologies if this has been discussed previously - I searched, and was unable to find a previous “idea”]

I live in London. Greater London is 39,000 streets / 17,000km. The person in first place has done 29% complete. i.e. it’s too big to plausibly complete.

Conveniently, London Boroughs are also available as Cities in Citystrides. These seem to be a nice size for a challenge - most are 1000-2000 streets.

As I’m getting close to completing my borough, I’ve been thinking about what next. And what I’d really like would be to define my own area boundary to track progress against.

I could imagine two different flavours of this:

  1. “Non-administrative” areas that are meaningful to lots of people. In London, a great example would be “Zone 1” or “Zone 2” - fare zones defined by London’s public transport administration. These would be understood by every Londoner on CityStrides, and would probably be more intuitive than the Boroughs to most.

Other examples would be local areas in London - e.g. Peckham, East Dulwich, Herne Hill, Brixton etc.

The difficulty is that neither of these boundaries are “officially” defined, as far as I know. Perhaps OSM London experts know different?

The main point is that Leaderboards would be meaningful to lots of people for these sorts of areas. Perhaps there’s an feature analogy with Strava segments? Perhaps the number of Global cities that would benefit from this is small enough that these could be manually curated?

  1. An arbitrary area that is only really of interest to me. No point in a leaderboard, but I’d be interested to track my progress towards a personally meaningful goal.

I could imagine drawing out an area on the CityStrides map, giving it a name, and then it showing up in my list of Cities like any other. I assume it would be simpler if it only showed up in my list. This would avoid an explosion of mostly meaningless areas, and possibly avenues for abuse of the feature?

just chiming in to say I like this idea a lot. It would also help striders in cities like Boston where there are no definitions to the neighborhoods, so people could draw their own arbitrary ones for neighborhoods like Back Bay, Allston, etc.

I also like this idea. For your 2nd point, it would be nice if it also included an option to draw a circle of a specific radius around a selected point, so you could e.g. create a custom area “10km radius around your home” or similar.

4 Likes

Interesting idea. Here in Amsterdam we have ‘stadsdelen’ (~ boroughs), I am aiming to run those one by one. They are official entities, but OSM doesn’t want to map them because of reasons. So this would help.

I think this idea could be split into 2 implementations:

  • show the custom area on a map and only show not run nodes inside this area. That would already be a big help for me
  • make the area just like a city, with a list of completed streets etc. I think this might be very resource for CS though.

Great idea - but who says I can’t complete Greater London? Ok I am on 29% but I was on less than 10% in January - it’s good to have goals - ok I might have to move house eventually but that’s a minor inconvenience :joy:

13 Likes

It would be cool if we could select a few cities and make them into our personalised region to run as that would account for the local knowledge of that being a space to achieve even if it doesn’t fit the suburb / district / city parameters of maps.

I also like the idea of being able to ‘save’ the 20 km radius from my house as a ‘city’ and then work on running every street there. Makes it more personal to your own routes and runs than a suburb that you might live on the edge of.

2 Likes

Just to say I like this idea too, but I also wonder if there is a way for City Strides to just allow more lower level administrative boundaries. I have started using Wandrer because it seems to contain local ward boundaries in the UK, whereas OSM somehow doesn’t have these so City Strides doesn’t either. I have just started on a new area but it is geographically massive and I’ll never get close to finishing it, but I’d like to knock off a few of the individual wards within it!

1 Like

I’m not sure if this question makes any sense, but I’m trying to run every street within the I-440 belt line in Raleigh, NC. The boundary for Raleigh extends far beyond the 440 belt line, so the percent completed/total street count doesn’t really give me any insight into how far I’ve gone to complete my goal.

My idea is to have a user map out a region of the map, and CityStrides would show you the percent completed/street count for that given area. I think it could be helpful to track the streets that are outside the borders of a given city or to give you the boundaries of a specific neighborhood in your city (or something like that).

I’m not really sure if this is something that could be implemented, or if it would even be helpful to anyone else, but I just wanted to throw it out there. Thanks :slight_smile:

I merged your post into an existing similar request … this is also relevant for these ideas, overall: CountyStrides

This needs some thought, but I like the overall idea … something along the lines of:

  • click around the map to draw the border that you want (like route builder without the automatic drawing?)
  • save it as your own personal area to complete

Gotta figure out the technical issues of gathering streets for a random area and if/how that can be shared (like, others also joining in on the area you created)

8 Likes

Hi @JamesChevalier - Just wondered if you had made any progress towards this idea, or it was on your roadmap?

As an aside, i noticed that @salmo365 is now on 40% of Greater London, which is, frankly, astonishing. He’s averaged about 13km per day this year

1 Like