from Hacker News

I ran the length of every street in Pittsburgh [video]

by Audiophilip on 12/29/22, 1:13 AM with 66 comments

• by kawsper on 12/29/22, 11:08 AM

  Fun video, I like his style and humor.

  If you want to run all the streets in your city, there's loads of us using https://citystrides.com to track how many streets we've run (not affiliated, just a happy subscriber).

  It's also a handy way of finding ways to contribute to OpenStreetMaps, you discover lots of little details that isn't mapped correctly on these runs.

  I'm at a depressing 83 of 2655 streets (3.13%) in Copenhagen, Denmark. But at a whopping 86 of 446 streets (19.28%) in Malvern, England!

• by NotYourLawyer on 12/29/22, 2:36 PM

  Great YouTube channel. Here’s a fun video where he integrates a raspberry pi into a NES cartridge to do all kinds of crazy things using the NES’s native hardware. Spoiler alert: full-motion video of the rickroll video is not the craziest thing he manages to pull off.

  https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ar9WRwCiSr0

• by throwaway4736 on 12/29/22, 4:20 PM

  Pittsburgh is an awesome town. Very underrated. Lots of friendly people, great food, thriving business, and a lot more culture than you’d think.

• by dirtyid on 12/29/22, 4:55 AM

  Rare treat. Probably my "most enjoyed : least amount of videos ratio" content creator on youtube. Here's to waiting another year.

• by anodyne33 on 12/29/22, 8:40 PM

  For more info on the city stairs that are mapped as streets, Laura Zurowski walked all 739+ and documented with Polaroids and wrote a vignette inspired by each. Lovely writing style and she did a great job of capturing pictures that you'd see if you're on foot, off the beaten path, and deliberately surveying your surroundings.

  https://mis-steps.com/

  Her Instagram I think is the best way to browse the project.

• by zeendo on 12/29/22, 12:54 PM

  Awesome video.

  There's also https://wandrer.earth/ which tracks either cycling or running and your progress within various administrative districts. I'm not affiliated with it but I do know the creators - it started as an Atlanta only project but has been global for a few years now.

• by mannykannot on 12/29/22, 1:23 PM

  I wondered if Tom would include the streets that are long staircases, and, starting at the 10 minute point, he does.

  I have tried a "Manhattan nondeterministic run" a couple of times. The rules are simple: do not cross streets except where and when permitted by the crosswalk signs, and then you must cross. In practice, strict adherence to the "don't start crossing on flashing signs" rule leads to there being many times when you go around the same block more than once, and I am not suggesting one should do otherwise.

• by jrochkind1 on 12/29/22, 1:59 PM

  Pittsburgh's street map is especially insane.

• by dendrite9 on 12/29/22, 7:20 PM

  Ricky Gates did a similar project in San Francisco in 45 days. http://www.rickeygates.com/everysinglestreet

  During the start of covid I tried to walk every street within a distance of my house, since it started from home and it was more about seeing what was near me the range became more arbitrary over time. Cool to see he stuck with this.

• by LadyCailin on 12/29/22, 2:33 AM

  His other videos are worth a watch too. Fantastic content.

• by say_it_as_it_is on 12/29/22, 12:54 PM

  I was interested in the "GoPro Knockoff" mentioned in the video. It's an Akaso 5000 series. Akaso now has a 7000 model for $70. I'm very curious about this product! Not much info about storage media compatibility. Can anyone comment?

  https://www.akasotech.com/product/ek7000

• by francisofascii on 12/29/22, 1:37 PM

  This is fantastic. Very impressive video. There is an web app I used a few years ago, https://citystrides.com, that links to your Strava/Garmin account and would give you a percentage of roads you traversed for a particular town. Haven't used it in a while but it seemed to work pretty well.

• by thrdbndndn on 12/29/22, 11:36 AM

  Great video!

  What is sports onion?

• by decasia on 12/29/22, 5:29 PM

  It's interesting, it seems at first somewhat gratuitous to have such a complex gamified system for something like running along city streets, and you can find yourself wondering why humans find such joy from following self-invented rules like this...

  But then I think to myself: Let's consider the physiological side effects of this project -- the exceptionally great physical (at least cardiovascular) shape that you would end up with from doing anything like this...

• by mgkimsal on 12/29/22, 6:17 PM

  Tangentially related, a friend of mine planned a shaped run, ran it, then it got picked up by some local media (couple years ago).

  https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/detroit/2020...

• by donretag on 12/29/22, 6:08 PM

  There is some gamification like this at https://wandrer.earth/

  I've been doing the same using Strava Heatmaps, cycling the Hollywood Hills. Lots of very steep dead-end streets. Cannot just wing it since you never know when there might be a street coming up, new streets need to be planned.

• by NathanBaulch on 12/30/22, 6:32 AM

  I did something like this during lockdown and created a tool in Golang to animate my runs. https://github.com/NathanBaulch/rainbow-roads#readme

• by js2 on 12/29/22, 10:24 PM

  I ran the circumference of an entire country once while on vacation:

  https://connect.garmin.com/modern/activity/616188437

• by jart on 12/29/22, 6:07 PM

  Wow. If he did that while handing out campaign flyers, he'd be the mayor.

• by kernal on 12/29/22, 8:00 PM

  I found the uncovering of the "trap streets" amusing and how they would change once made public.

• by w0m on 12/29/22, 4:55 PM

  Absolutely love this. Great job Tom.

• by rzzzt on 12/29/22, 11:27 AM

  That's a half marathon on average for each run?

• by FpUser on 12/29/22, 12:09 PM

  Fantastic project and presentation. Best wishes.

• by zabzonk on 12/29/22, 4:44 PM

  good title for a springsteen song?