Any good suggestion on how you should be efficiently running massively wide roads (especially in a major American city), other than having to run in the middle of a busy road?
This is from my morning run in Glendale, Arizona. I ran a long the sidewalk on one side of the road (for obvious reason) but I also miss some of the nodes on the other side of the same road.
As if city like Phoenix or its 'burbs is not big enough with thousand of roads, I’m a bit hesitant to having to run many of its roads twice to hit all of the nodes.
I just plan to run both sides of the road. It’s kind of annoying, but I try to build my routes in a way that will hit wide streets on one of my first runs in the area. That way, if I have to do the other side I can usually route that in while doing other streets.
Can you share a link to an activity or two that are good examples of this? It’s ok if the data is private - I just want to run some code to find the distance between it and the nearest node(s).
It would also help if you could provide a link to one of the streets, so that I can check out its node placement in OpenStreetMap.
The current requirement is 25 meters, and while I’m hesitant to change this, I do want to see if you’re - say - 26 meters away in these cases. I also don’t recall any formal logic going into the 25 meter decision all the way back in 2013 … Plus Interstate Highway standards - Wikipedia includes some interesting and useful width stats that could be useful to come up with a more “scientific” required distance.
I’m a bit worried about the ‘run it twice’ logic, since - if the nodes are in the middle of the street - if running down one side of the street isn’t close enough to mark it as complete, then running down the other side of the street isn’t going to accomplish anything more.
@JamesChevalier I think you misunderstood the ”run in the middle” method. This is about wide streets with separate lanes, one in each direction, and nodes on both of them. So far apart that when you run on the sidewalk you catch only the lane next to you, you have to run back on the other side to catch that lane. What he suggests is to run once in the middle of the road, to catch both sides in one run. I normally run both sides, but in some cases where there is a grass strip between the lanes I have tried this trick, but it feels a bit like cheating
Yeah. The answer is that there is no good way to do it. Sometimes you can run the median if it is wide enough. Sometimes you just got to find a time where the traffic is really low, and you can run in the street (think early Sunday mornings). Sometimes you just gotta run both sides of the street.
Running those busy, commercial/industrial streets is the worst part of the CityStrides journey. They’re never fun runs. But I suppose if it were all easy…
On wide streets with a median, I try to run in the bike lane, shoulder or edge of the sidewalk when it is safe to do so. If that doesn’t pick up the nodes on the opposite side, then I run the other side. I have seen another strider who ran the entire length of a 14.6 mile road and used manual completion since s/he did not collect the nodes on the opposite side. I felt this was an acceptable use of manual completion. The person finished the road but it was not automatically marked as “completed” according to the 90% citystrides metrics.
The wide roads issue and safety is a reason that I do not use hard mode. In some cases, there’s no sidewalk, shoulder or occasionally no pedestrian access on one side but there are uncollected nodes.
I agree. I have no idea what the draw to hard mode is. Nodes aren’t real. They’re kinda abstract digital representations of roadway alignments. I KNOW when I’ve run a street. I started running at that intersection down there and turned off at that intersection over there. If whatever nodes get lit up or not, I still ran between those streets.
My problem is that I’m too big of a rule-follower to ever actually manually complete a street. I’ve got one City that I could mark as done, but I’m one node short at one intersection that I’ve run through 3 times - just didn’t hit that node on the opposite side. I’ve been tempted to just go add nodes to the part I’ve completed just to get up over 90%, but that feels dirty too…
I have the same problem in UK with https://citystrides.com/streets/11199005 which is one road name and two phyiscal roads. Is is huge nope not at all It just means I need to do it twice and its not even a main road
If a road is split, like in much of your example, I think you should run both sides of the road. I do that for every split road, and yes, it’s a battle.
If the road is just super wide, then suck it up and get the nodes by running in the middle of the highway, late at night. Or don’t get them; that’s what “easy” mode is for.
Mapping an entire city is meant to be a challenge, and those difficult nodes are the ones that make 100 % a huge accomplishment.
