This will sound terribly petty, I realize. I did like the idea of being the first person to complete my city, but not long after I started, someone suddenly went very rapidly to 100%. When I look at that person’s life map, huge areas of the city are missing, and I do mean several whole large suburbs.
I know there are good reasons that you might want to mark a street manually, but there is usually a better way to solve it. I would like to assume good faith (perhaps historical information stored on an app that isn’t compatible with CityStrides, for example) but it included many streets that are no longer in CityStrides, since I removed them from OpenStreetMap having found that they were not physically accessible. Just sitting and marking one street after another as manually complete seems rather against the spirit of the thing. Is there no way to limit this, or am I a bit daft even for caring about it?
Potentially they have certain activities’ visibility set to “Just me” (aka private). That would mean they don’t show up on their map for others to see.
What about people that don’t have a device capable of recording their runs/walks? All they can do is mark off streets as manually completed.
While I can understand your drive and commitment to be first to complete your city, there are no medals or trophies for doing so; not even a digital badge on your profile. Another person beating you to the “finish line” doesn’t change the hard work and effort you put in to complete the task as well. As an analogy, the vast majority of runners don’t sign up for traditional races with thoughts of winning. In reality, only a few (usually highly-trained runners) actually have a chance of winning. The rest are out there to have fun, push ourselves to new limits or achieve another personal goal. If all that mattered was winning then the Boston marathon would have ~50 entrants instead of ~30k.
And to even say this other person beat you to the finish line is a bit of a misnomer. OSM data is always being update with new construction, street changes, etc. So maybe they are 100% complete today but on the next city update, they have new streets to complete but you already did those new streets. So then you stand at the top alone at 100%. “Completing” a city is a Sisyphus challenge that we have all signed up for and personally I enjoy that aspect of it. I may have a completed city today but likely I’ll move somewhere else in the future and that city will continue to grow and I won’t be at 100% anymore. C’est la vie; on to a new adventure!
I suspect Marty is correct about private activities being the reason the lifemap has big chunks missing. I set the vast majority of my activities to private so my public lifemap looks like about 1% of what I’ve actually run.
But I do understand Daniel’s frustration in not being first to complete his city.
A better analogy for what Daniel felt happened would be: Daniel enters the Boston Marathon and unexpectedly takes the lead and maintains that lead until he’s into the finish straight. At which point somebody overtakes him on a bike, then jumps off the bike to run across the finish line for the win. Daniel has no cause to be disappointed because he still made it to the finish?
Reaching 100% in a city (even if only for a day or two) is always an achievement, but being the first to do so on Citystrides can add a lot of extra personal satisfaction to the feat and if more than one person is trying to be first, competition is going to be inevitable.
I’ve completed a few cities myself and the ones where I thought I might be first to do so certainly gave me extra motivation to get out the door on cold and wet days. Literally nobody I know cares I’ve completed these cities or that I was first to do so, but to me it means something.
Maybe there could be an upper limit of 10% for manual completions, analogous to the 90% node completion requirement for streets. That would stop people clicking their way to 100% while leaving enough wiggle room for legit exceptions.
I tried to consider other possibilities, certainly, as assuming good faith is fundamental. But in this particular case it didn’t look plausible, Gradual building up over a couple of years until one month in 2021, when the last few hundred streets are invisibly recorded over the space of a couple of weeks, and then streets in other cities are visibly completed over that month and since. And it is indeed purely for my own satisfaction that I want to do it - with only two exceptions, everyone that I have explained what I am doing is quite baffled by the whole idea of it.
If you look at the individual streetss, it says " Completed: Manually" if it’s manually completed.
If there’s a date for completion, it’s completed with an activity.
I checked a bunch of streets in Leicester and none of them are completed manually.
I usually Citystride once a week, in the weekend.
But this summer i ran almost daily for my 3 week holiday and completed 320 streets.
My 2 week xmas holiday i also ran almost daily, finishng 238 streets.
I understand your point, though, being new to CityStrides, I manually marked some of the streets in my immediate neighborhood as completed. My idea for an improvement is not for a limit but to be able to see on a map all of the streets completed, plus the normal walking/running activity. That way you can see what streets are completed and which ones aren’t more easily.
I’ve only been on City Strides for about 6 months but I definitely relate to this! I completed small town in January but with a recent update it is no longer at 100%. Guess I’ll have to go back next time I’m in that area & finish it again (3 hours away near gf parents house).
