Pedestrian area

Support City/Street/Node Issues
41

I agree! I want to fill in as many white spots as possible! A big square which is tagged as a pedestrian area just mean white space to me, so if course I run it!

42

It’s not a node collection exercise, it is street collecting where nodes are the method used to determine if you ran the street. If I run a city and run the length of every street, then I would expect to complete that city because I have passed every node as a result, not because I was trying to get just the nodes. I would not expect to have to run around a square.

If you run around the outside, the white space will still be there.

FWIW I don’t care if pedestrian areas / squares are included as part of CityStrides, but not when it can only be determined by perimeter nodes. If it is included, then grass parks should be included as well since you run across them.

43

That’s why I referred you to the example in my comment where I didn’t need to run around the perimeter. The ~10 meter proximity is sufficient to pick up most perimeter nodes by running a straight line or sometimes two.

It’s so silly to me that some people get hung up on a lawyer-ly reading of the phrase “Run Every Street”. It’s a tagline, a slogan! Not necessarily a mission statement. You should want to run every runnable space in your city. Foot paths, pedestrian spaces, public staircases, the whole shebang.

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44

Is this the most up-to-date topic on Pedestrian areas? There seems to be an outstanding disagreement on philosophy of inclusion/exclusion of some of these types.

@JamesChevalier, looking for guidance on this idea - I think it was not implemented but wanted to check.

There’s a pavilion in the middle of a park that is in no way related to streets or roads that I think should be excluded but I want to be in line with both OSM and CityStrides standards.

Link to “streets” in question: Linden Terrace, Billings Terrace

This specific example is unimportant, but wanted to clarify in general the approach.

45

Overall, my opinion hasn’t changed much since my 2023 post:

The corresponding OSM pages for these two streets:

For these, the place=square wouldn’t work but the area=yes would. If I apply that tag to my street search, only these two Ways are returned. So in this specific case, ignoring area=yes would resolve the issue and not cause any other changes. That seems like the more reliable tag to follow, as well.

I’m very likely to add ['area' != 'yes'] to the street query, but I would like to spot-check some more cities with the inverse (to get a sense of what would be removed if/when I apply this).

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46

Cool- think that makes a lot of sense to do.

Going to need to issue a trigger warning… total street counts are going to drop probably! Guessing (largely unfounded) that there will be a greater drop for European runners, but suspect overall it should be << 1% of.

Is there anyway I could check that if helpful? Like export a list of my completed streets and cross-reference to OSM tags to see expected hit?

47

Guess I’m losing this one, just need to voice my disappointment one more time if this change goes through. I haven’t seen anyone rebut my above comment:

James, maybe at least run a poll or something before making the change? Either way, it’s your call and I’ll [try to] cease complaining about it.

48

I scrolled back to where you mentioned Praça Natália Correia so I could check how many streets would be removed in Abrantes e Alferrarede if I make this change - it came back with 9 that would be removed. I include some Google Street View links for some of them; outside of the parking lot, they’re nice looking places that suggest local running is a nice adventure.

  • Praça Raimundo José Soares Mendes (courtyard)
  • Largo João de Deus
  • Jardim do Actor Taborda (a park-like thing)
  • Largo Doutor Ramiro Guedes (courtyard)
  • Praça Barão da Batalha
  • Adro de São Vicente (a church parking lot)
  • Praça Natália Correia
  • Praceta Alexandre O’Neil
  • Praceta António Gedeão

I recall walking through similar pedestrian ways when I was traveling through Italy years ago as part of a three-month long backpacking trip. These places fully stretch the idea of ‘street’ especially from a car-brained US perspective, but many of them - Praça Raimundo José Soares Mendes might be the closest that I’ve had the pleasure to walk through - do provide a form of thoroughfare for people. I can definitely see the appeal of continuing your runs through these places, as opposed to avoiding them.

As far as the phrasing “Run Every Street” is concerned, I do take that pretty literally. The about page recalls how I started all of this:

CityStrides started in 2013 with me wondering if I could run every street in my city. I had a way to track my running, but I didn’t have a way to figure out which streets I had run. That’s where OpenStreetMap came in. I could gather the streets for my city from there, and then compare that data to my running.

I get that people want to run everywhere, and it’s somewhat of a logical extension to finishing every street (personally, I think my mind would go towards trails first), but I’m already doing quite the effort in limiting how “street” is defined in CityStrides and this extension of removing areas seems like it lines up with that existing street query.

The easiest way I’ve found to check on what would be removed is to visit the city page in CityStrides … Open the vertical three dot menu & click OpenStreetMap … Copy the relation ID out of the URL (it’s the last number in the URL) … Visit https://overpass-turbo.eu and use that relation ID in this query:

[timeout:900][out:json];
rel(PASTE_THE_COPIED_RELATION_ID_HERE);
map_to_area -> .a;
(
way(area.a)
['name']
['highway']
['highway' !~ 'bridleway|bus_guideway|bus_stop|busway|construction|corridor|cycleway|elevator|escape|footway|motorway|motorway_junction|motorway_link|path|platform|proposed|raceway|razed|rest_area|services|steps|trunk']
['access' !~ 'customers|no|private']
['aeroway' !~ 'jet_bridge']
['amenity' !~ 'weighbridge']
['expressway' != 'yes']
['fee' != 'yes']
['foot' != 'no']
['indoor' !~ 'area|column|corridor|door|level|room|wall|yes']
['public_transport' != 'platform']
['razed' != 'highway']
['service' !~ 'drive-through|driveway|parking_aisle']
['toll' != 'yes']
['area' = 'yes'];
node(w)(area.a);
);
out;

This is a reasonably recent copy of the street query that will only return the Way records tagged with area=yes.

1 Like
49

Thanks for sharing this code! Made it really easy to compile a list of some large cities as well as home cities for the top 10 CityStriders (+#11, just for you @kevincharlespels)

image
image1625×477 36.6 KB

I’ve sorted it by “% change” if this rule were to be put in place. Most cities queried would have an impact on total “street” count of +/-1%, with notable exceptions of Paris and Manhattan.

While the impact is probably secondary to aligning definitions as per your vision for the site and overall philosophy, I do think this mini-fact base supports the idea that impact would be relatively small (@salmo365, you can be the first runner to pass 23k twice!)

50

Thanks for engaging and looking at those examples, you do see a bit of what stands to be lost from the requirement of completing a city if that change is made. Reading your response I felt like I was kind of winning you over until the third paragraph, your impetus for beginning CityStrides - I still contend that this raison d’etre for the site can evolve and elaborate over time, as have so many other aspects of this platform due to your own hard work and input from users such as myself! There is a focus in your and @davemorin’s replies here on street count and effect on street count…I honestly have come to care a lot less about that. To me, CityStrides is a framework to encourage the user to complete their city, confined by the definitional limits of OpenStreetMap. I love reading the articles other users have posted when they get interviewed about completing their city in the media, hearing the little details about what they learned and discovered during their (usually years-long) journey.

So there’s the coding/technical aspect of building out the CityStrides platform, and the philosophical aspect of what it is and how to use it. Philosophically, I think more narrowly defining what is a road or street reduces the city, reduces the challenge, reduces the incentive to explore. Therefore, technically, I feel we should be including more named way relations in the CityStride street list. Road, street, avenue, etc. have discrete definitions but the landscape around them may have evolved in the decades or centuries since they first were named. In fact, that concept spurred me to pause this response yesterday and write another semi-tangential post: Atlas of road types in Portugal, a guide

If I had my way, the named way types currently excluded on OSM that I’d add are alleys (this one being out truly mystifies me), [public] driveways, paths, foot paths, and steps, and keep pedestrian areas of course. My criteria for exclusion would be strictly safety (no highways, tunnels, etc.). But I’m not in charge, so I’ll keep on exploring my surroundings in the way I like, and I’m always grateful to you and CityStrides for starting me on this semi-obsessive adventure. And I know from posting here over the years that there are other striders like me who prioritize painting their map as purple as possible :slight_smile: Just want to reiterate my appreciation for the good faith engagement from both of you despite our differing of opinions. Cheers

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51

Alleys are included :+1:t3:

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