Is there a timeline for when this will resume?
No, I can’t provide a timeline.
It’s the only thing I’m working on right now, but the tests I have to run take at least 30 minutes - up to 6.5 hours.
It feels like I can start doing full city sync tests this/early next week … but none of my experience on this effort so far suggests that I should be optimistic. 
Update: My test against Greater London went very well today. I still have some general discovery to do - probably 3-5 hours of tests - but I should be able to start running full sync tests soon. I’m hoping as early as tomorrow, but again … I’ve been working on this since October 2025.
Whenever I do get to the full sync tests, I’ll use the cities that are already queued.
Ah was going to ask. Out of interest what is different now to previously? There have been times when these to work almost straight away and other times like now when obviously got issues.
Speaking of Greater London - this is one of the “mysteries” of CS. I live just outside London and where I am the “cities” just outside London are around 1000-2000 streets and “standalone” although are part of “Surrey”. My main medium term aim is to complete “Surrey” which is effectively like Greater London in that there is a Surrey authoritative body like there is for Greater London. Have done about 75%. 2.5 cities to go out of 10. However if I goto other parts of the UK, places like Surrey are split into tiny areas of maybe 10 streets and indeed have done one in that area which had just one! So completing a city could literally be one run or several years work! One presumes a sync of Greater London is vastly more complex than those 1 street “cities”… Then also you get the issue that say Station Road in a sub city of London might be 30 plus miles away from another one across the other side of London and each city would have several like this so completing one street here is getting for a life’s work!
Some cities sync & get processed quickly … Some cities take a very long time. Factors include:
- The number of streets
- How many people are running there
- How many activities there are within the city (the biggest factor)
When there’s one city that takes 20 days to process post-sync, it blocks everywhere else.
England is quite difficult, as far as city admin level choice in OpenStreetMap is concerned. Replace England's admin level 6 (and 8 in some cases) with admin level 10 is relevant to this topic.
Oops, gotta step away - I’ll update this with more info when I’m able.
It would help avoid some confusion (and what I imagine is a massive backlog of queued cities) to disable queuing and/or update the status page to reflect that city syncs are currently not running.
Any update on when city syncing will be back up and running?
It seems to be up now despite status page saying it’s down. I got a update on of my cities tonight and I’m seeing changes in the queue each time I check
Hi Erik,
I agree - after I read your latest post, I checked the city I recently queued for sync and it has been processed on the 31st of August. 
Only 25 streets left now in Wittmund, East Frisia, with the corrections having been synced, but I still need at least six runs for these. 
I’ve got the sync system back up and running … The only limitation right now is that it’s only syncing cities that have fewer than 8k people running in them. I still need to do some one-off testing with the top 20 most populated cities in CityStrides.
Paris, specifically, caused the most trouble. I’m thinking it’s because of the high speed rail connection there & maybe its location in relation to fly space. There are tons of activities that have some piece within the border of Paris and are just obscenely stupid (long flights, track/pause/travel/track, loitering for a long time before/after an activity, that kinda stuff).
Thanks James!
Side note: are you suggesting that Parisians like to loiter at e.g. streetside cafes? 
This looks like a retirement / assisted living community
Quite likely elderly people with tracking devices running 24/7
The screenshot was just a piece of the whole activity, but yeah - people tracking weird stuff, for sure.
Had a few suburbs and a council area (about 6 or 7 suburbs worth) synced here in Melbourne over the last couple of days and it seems to be working much much faster.
Hopefully you get can get the bigger cities sorted out too!