Does donating prioritise my city?

brendonrjones · June 2, 2019, 7:10am

Hi,

Does donating increase the likelihood of my city being added to CityStrides?

I would love to use CityStrides and more than willing to help out financially (as I’m sure a lot of people in the same situation are).

Brendon Jones
Resident of Canberra, Australia

JamesChevalier · June 2, 2019, 1:48pm

I like that you’ve brought this idea up - I’m sitting here wondering if I should spend a bit more time following around Supporters to make sure everything is for them. Thanks.

For Canberra - check out the OSM search results for this city. If you click on each of the blocks (not the ‘details’ button, but the block itself) you’ll see how the map never displays a city border. For comparison, a search for Sydney shows its border.
This lack of a border means that there’s no data for me to extract.

I have no idea how to update OSM with the borders of a city. There are some people around here who are familiar with OSM editing - it’s possible that someone could help us out here…

brendonrjones · June 2, 2019, 7:27pm

Hi,

I think I understand the problem, when I search for ‘District Australian Capital Territory’ in OSM (search results) it shows a series of ‘Administrative Boundaries’ for Canberra (Australian Capital Territory). Each of these seems to have a usable boundary. They are linked through the Australian Capital Territory (Canberra) parent.

Here are a couple of examples:
Gungahlin (North Canberra)
Tuggeranong (South Canberra)

Thanks for taking the time to reply.

Cheers,
Brendon

Edit: Since posting this, I’ve gone down the rabbit hole a little bit (following your Github instructions) and understand how time consuming this must be for you.

brendonrjones · June 2, 2019, 10:02pm

Well, you sold me. I became a supporter. Even if Canberra never makes it on here, I love the idea of this site.

Brendon

JamesChevalier · June 2, 2019, 11:45pm

Ah! It looks like Australia is set up differently from other countries I’ve come across…

Starting at Australia, scroll down that page to (nearly) the end - there’s an “Administrative” section. Those would map to “regions” in CityStrides.
Clicking through the ‘details’ link for Australian Capital Territory brings us here. Scrolling down that page to the “Administrative” section displays a bunch of Districts, which have an Admin Level of 7. In most other countries, I can go from the “region” level directly to the “city” level - so I’m unsure if these Districts are “city enough” for CityStrides or not.

Going with one of your examples, District of Gungahlin - is that the city you’d expect in CityStrides or … if you scroll down to the “Administrative” section - are those the cities you’d expect in CityStrides e.g. Amaroo?

After looking into some of these Districts a bit more, it seems to me like these would be the cities I’d add to CityStrides (not the suburbs/villages that are within them):

District of Belconnen
District of Canberra Central
District of Coree
District of Cotter River
District of Gungahlin
District of Hall
District of Jerrabomberra
District of Kowen
District of Majura
District of Molonglo Valley
District of Paddys River
District of Stromlo
District of Tuggeranong
District of Weston Creek
District of Woden Valley

brendonrjones · June 3, 2019, 8:22am

Hi James,

The Districts you listed fit perfectly as ‘cities’ within the Australian Capital Territory. The individual suburbs/villages are too narrow to be useful in the context of CityStrides.

Thanks for taking the time to look at this. I think every state/territory in Australia works differently in OSM. If you need some help navigating what would work in Australia, I’m more than happy to help however I can.

Cheers!
Brendon

brendonrjones · June 5, 2019, 7:47am

Hi James,

Is there any value in me going through the process outlined in the link below to generate the Poly file? Or will I just make more work for everyone?

github.com

JamesChevalier/cities/blob/master/README.md

# cities

This is a collection of `.poly` files for cities, with the definition of 'city' being the area one level under the region/state level. There isn't a whole lot of concern here for discrepancies between cities, towns, villages, etc.

These `.poly` files are used to then extract just the city's OSM file from a greater region's OSM file. For example, creating an exact OSM file for Boston from the North America OSM file. More information on actually using the `.poly` files is provided at the bottom of this document.

The ultimate goal is to have them all, but it's a rough process right now. The process explained below shows how to retrieve the `.poly` file for a specific city, but the process I've gone through to gather most of the files in this repository is much more automated and uses [Overpass Turbo](http://overpass-turbo.eu/).

### How To Get The Poly File For A Specific City

Sometimes a city won't have a Relation ID, or the Relation that exists will be broken. For those instances, the final OSM file can be created manually by tracing the city at [http://extract.bbbike.org/](http://extract.bbbike.org/). Just make sure to select one of the 'OSM XML' formats in the top pulldown menu there.

* Go to [http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/](http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/) and search for the city you'd like added

    ![](images/howto1.png)

* Click the 'details' link for that city in the left column

    ![](images/howto2.png)

This file has been truncated. show original

Cheers,
Brendon

JamesChevalier · June 5, 2019, 11:44am

I have another more automated process to collect full countries/regions, so it’s probably not worth your effort in retrieving just the one poly file.
So I’ll go through and collect everything (each of the Admin level 7 Districts) within Australian Capital Territory. Some time in the future, I can go through the same process for each other Admin level 4 regions in the Administrative section of Australia - since you mentioned that each region might have its own organization.

supermitch · June 10, 2019, 4:06pm

How’s Canberra coming along, @JamesChevalier? Anything we can do to help? (Sounds like no…) I did, a while back, go through the process for Ottawa but didn’t know how to get it to you. I have your email now, would it help? Is it actually beneficial for people to send you files?

w.sergent · June 20, 2019, 10:04pm

@JamesChevalier - Any chance we can work through a similar process for Sydney, and any value in the poly files I previous created for you?

A lot of the features of the site (home page, most run streets, etc etc) pose little to no value to myself as a regular user, as none of the streets I run are part of your cities!
I still use it for the lifemap, etc so that I can physically see which streets I have run, even if they count for nothing

JamesChevalier · June 21, 2019, 12:50am

Sorry @supermitch / @w.sergent / others … June is wild busy for me.

I’ve got three major areas that I’m working on / intending to work on:

adding new cities (this pairs with data cleanup, in that I don’t want to run my old import script because it imports lots of bad data … I’ve been working with a few other people in other threads on this)
a new activity tracking integration
a new feature to help complete streets

That’s the main order of priority, but things shift around from day to day for various reasons.

Update re-reading this, it sounds a bit nonsensical/off topic … I just mean to say that I can’t devote as much time I want to CityStrides right now, but I’ll be back in July to work on this as well as some other things

dbafounta · July 27, 2019, 2:05pm

As far as I can see, it does not.

It would be nice if @JamesChevalier would explain better the challenges he faces, his roadmap and how we can help, because not having your city is a major inconvenient. I come here daily, but at the same time, I am frustrated because identifying missing streets is difficult and progress is not measured.

veronica.b · September 1, 2021, 1:32pm

Having the districts of Canberra available as citystrides regions is great news. Being able to see the streets I’ve collected encourages me to keep at it. Having the districts also means we can break up running/walking every street of Canberra into regions and feel like we’re getting somewhere when we can tick off first a street, then more, then a suburb and then complete 100% a district/region.

@brendonrjones did you consider asking for the ACT itself (the level up from the admin districts) to be a city since basically the ACT is Canberra and then Canberra could be run like a city like Glasgow? Yes it would include a lot of land to the south west but that could be an extra challenge for those so motivated. For the rest the leaderboard and percentage would show their progress for Canberra as a whole.

brendonrjones · September 1, 2021, 11:11pm

Yeah, I see your point.

Canberra was previously broken up into North/South/West etc and it was epic to try and complete the city. I can see that it is now broken up by suburb. Not sure which I prefer…

This current setup gives me more short term motivation.

brendonrjones · September 1, 2021, 11:24pm

I guess the solution might be that it would be cool if you could see % completion of city and of the broader state…

veronica.b · September 6, 2021, 5:05am

Being able to complete the northside or southside would have been fun! However, it would have been large areas to cover.

Currently there are suburbs and then the next level up is districts (groups of suburbs) like Gungahlin or Weston Creek or Woden Valley. That’s pretty handy but one more level up (ie the ACT) would be convenient too.

As you say, all three levels provide different amounts of motivation and encouragement to keep completing streets.