From my experience on CityStrides, the least pleasant experience is running the extent of a larger busier road and discovering that it is too wide - so you have to run down both sides of the road, and in many cases off the foot path to grab all the nodes. Sometimes the roadside is also too obstructed to run nearby, and so isolated missed nodes appear here and there, with is further frustrating when using hard mode. Furthermore, intersections of certain roads get cluttered with nodes, some of which are quite difficult to safely grab.
I think many people may agree that these issues occurs for the most part on Primary roads (as labelled on OSM), and so I think the mode detection algorithm could benefit by allowing nodes on primary roads to have a wider detection radius. Maybe doubling it? In some cases I still don’t think that would be enough.
You bring up an interesting issue. I’ve been running a number of wide streets in Los Angeles and so many of them require running them twice, once on each side, so it literally doubles the number of miles needed to complete the street. On a few low traffic, days and times, I’ve run down the middle of a divided street just to avoid having to run it twice.
I end up running both sides of a street quite a bit. That doesn’t bother me so much; I’m kind of used to it. How about when you run both sides of the street (albeit on the sidewalk) and still don’t get the node? Happened to me three times last week.
For these scenarios, I’d probably mark it as manually completed (that button is on the street’s page). I might even do that after running down one side though I couldn’t say for sure because I don’t have streets like that near me.
Things can get gnarly for fairly simple suggestions like this … This idea seems decent - if there are no other nodes within some distance, then increase the allowed distance between the activity and the node - but that requires at least one more geo query in both activity processing as well as post-city-sync processing.
I’m not saying “no” to this idea - I’m happy to run some benchmarks to see how impactful the change is, when I spot some free time - but with such a simple fix of marking it as complete with a single button press, this isn’t very high on my list.
I’ve been going back and running - a third time - closer to the center of the street (on the grass between sidewalk and street usually handles it.) It’s annoying but I’ve implemented enough “fairly simple suggestions” that turned into big complex messes to get your point of view too.
Yes, I’ve had that a couple of times as well. Running on the cycleway/footway next to a big street and missing a few nodes were it’s just a bit too far away. Always managed to go back and run closer to the street for that section. Why should it be easy?
I’ve encountered this situation a few times. Nodes were missed by the running on the pedestrian infrastructure which was not close enough to the road itself
There’s a safety issue here. Pedestrian/bike infrastructure was implemented. While running on the road or near it might not explicitly be prohibited, there’s a reason that a sidewalk or bypass exists for foot travel.
In my experience, this is mainly an issue for hard mode users. Non-hard mode citystriders can accept that a road was run with reasonable safety measures and without necessarily getting all the nodes. As for hard mode members, I guess the options are to travel it in a safe manner or adjust OSM to make it pedestrian prohibited (even if technically it isn’t illegal).
This is just one example that I’ve encountered. The road is an overpass to a busy expressway so ped infrastructure was created so that guys on foot don’t need to navigate cars going 40-50 mph or the commuter train which gets up to around 80 mph (just south of the expressway in this screenshot). The bypass goes under the expressway ramps but it’s far away from the nodes. While the strava heatmap shows that some people have traveled these nodes on foot, the majority of runners choose the footpath for safety, comfort and pleasure. That said, I get that there’s some appeal to the danger element of running on a road with cars whizzing by at high speeds.
I do not offer any solution for the original post, but I think safety comes first, even if that means not doing hard mode.
though I couldn’t say for sure because I don’t have streets like that near me.
