Ground rules?

I introduced some friends to CS, but they haven’t grasped the 90% rule. I thought I could find an entry explaining this, but didn’t succeed… Is there anything official to show them?

Recommend taking a look at this wiki page (About the Node, Street and City Data). Technically the 90% “rule” refers to “completing” greater than or equal to 90% of nodes in a given street. This isn’t the same as running 90%+ of a given street’s length.

For example, if you have a 10 mile road that is dead straight for the entirety of the road with no intersections with other streets, crosswalks, streams or other mapping item types, in OpenStreetMap (the source where CityStrides gets its mapping nodes) that road could technically be built with only two nodes; one on each end. So running say 9 miles, starting from one end and then stopping would not get you to the 90% threshold because you have not reached that other node at the end. A good example of this “node hunting” approach can be seen in diagram A in this post. Each strider may have a different perspective of whether node hunting is or isn’t actually running/walking an entire street but in the end running an entire city is a solo task each person does so who cares what others think. No trophies are awarded so you do you.

In another example, a 10 mile road couple be really curving for a 1 mile section. In order to build that street in OpenStreetMap, the builder will have to add extra nodes to make sure the nodes follow the path of the street. So perhaps the road has a 100 nodes in its entire length but 50 of them are in just that 1 mile curvy section. You’d be “half” way done with finishing that street if you ran just that curvy part.

Terms
Completing = Having a run/walk activity that has a recording with a GPS point that comes within 25 meters of a node
Node hunting = Completing activities with the specific goal of hitting nodes but not necessarily running/walking the space in between nodes

Tl;dr - Go to your desired city and next to one of the streets, select the Go button. This will zoom in on the map and show you that exact street on the map and have dots on it. Those dots are nodes. When you run/walk a street, your GPS recording device (usually watch or phone) needs to record you as having come within 25 meters of a node to get it marked as complete. To complete a street in CityStrides, you need to get at least 90% of a street’s nodes completed. One exception is if a street has 10 or less nodes; for those you have to get 100% of the nodes to get it marked as completed.

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