Coming to America(n Heatmapping)
Following up on my leaving Belgium mentioned in the last post, let us have a look at what I have been up to in my new area. I now reside in the suburbs of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. At least, here they refer to it as suburbs of Philadelphia. In Belgium, you would be several cities over. For reference to fellow Belgians: the distance from the Philadelphia city hall to our area is about the distance from the Grand Place in Brussels to the central train station in Antwerp.
My Vicinity
In my immediate area, I am just focused on getting more streets in. Evidently.
It is going OK so far. Nothing groundbreaking happening here, just chipping away at it with the diminished amount of running I do nowadays.
Running here is not always ideal. This place is made for cars; pedestrians be damned. The way to build here is often a busy road with dead end housing areas branching off from the busy road. Such a housing area can be just one street or it can be ten or more of them. In a housing area it is usually safe enough to run. Many of these residential streets are like three cars wide and not that busy. Newer ones even have sidewalks. I think they finally realised those could be useful.
Going between those housing areas is often a pain though. The roads connecting them are busy. They do not have sidewalks. Quite often they are only just two cars wide, my guess is because this area got settled much before the introduction of cars. If you are lucky, there is a flat grass section next to the road that you can hop on to if a car is coming. If not… hope for the best. Because of this, planning a running route involves a lot more thinking, a lot more keeping track of areas to avoid, a lot of detours to get anywhere.
Anyway, you make do. You get where you can get. There is a decent amount of nature, though the suburban lawns are a scourge on the earth (not to mention so useless on hot and sunny days). There are so many big birds of prey here to stare at in amazement. Those parts of running here are what I like.
With this area being so car heavy, I have also come to accept their usage myself. In Belgium, I would have scoffed at the idea of driving somewhere to do a run. Here, I do it as well from time to time, even just to run some streets, not just for “adventure” runs. It just is such a pain to get to places otherwise. That said, I find the effort of driving to places for a run also a pain, just one I deal with from time to time.
Cities
Because the roads to get places are just so dangerous to pedestrians and because things are quite spread out, focusing on cities has not been as fun. If you know you have to drive to get to the far side of places, it just becomes more of a chore.
I still glance at their progress though. I have one “city” completed and a handful near completion, depending on your definition of near completion. I am not particularly focused on dragging them to completion though. Maybe once the number of streets becomes too small to ignore.
Something I also have a look at, is my ranking in all those cities. Not many people here are active heatmappers (on CityStrides anyway). I am first in many low percentage cities, just due to a lack of competition. There is one guy here that has a few places completed, otherwise there would be even more first places in the centre of the map there. A little competition can motivate me, though since that person has them simply completed, it is not as exciting as a race to be the first one to complete.
Hexagons
As I had done in Belgium, the hexagon map has been my focus of completion. The map also paints a different picture. For some cities it looked like I had widespread progress, the hexagon map shows I have just done streets near me.
The street grid is not very dense here, so completing a single hexagon might be easier in comparison to Brussels? Though the hexagons are also about 15% larger in area here: 0.73 km² instead of 0.63 km² in Brussels (reminder that the earth is a sphere). That said, progress has felt slower than in Brussels, probably because getting to places is more of a pain.
My focus is on getting more green hexagons. Maybe once those really get too far away from me, I will think more about the blue wave spreading too.
PA Ranking
There is another thing I have been paying a little bit of attention to. Citystrides has a leaderboard for the number of streets you have completed within a region. So while I have over 13k worldwide, only a fraction of those are completed within Pennsylvania. Currently it says I am at 2038 streets in Pennsylvania, putting me in 21st position in the commonwealth.
I will probably never be first, the leader has nearly 14k streets in just Pennsylvania. Just climbing up the ladder adds a little extra motivation though. As with all things, the better you get, the harder the progress will be. I need another 1500 streets to get 10th place. Doing 1500 more still will only bump me up to 7th. For the time being, my goal is top 20. After that I will likely aim for 12th, which puts you on the first page in Citystrides.
| rank | streets in PA |
|---|---|
| 1 | 13815 |
| 2 | 5847 |
| 3 | 5804 |
| 4 | 5753 |
| 5 | 5332 |
| 6 | 5314 |
| 7 | 5240 |
| 8 | 5120 |
| 9 | 4938 |
| 10 | 3544 |
| 11 | 3441 |
| 12 | 3317 |
| 13 | 3224 |
| 14 | 3127 |
| 15 | 2564 |
| 16 | 2489 |
| 17 | 2253 |
| 18 | 2253 |
| 19 | 2237 |
| 20 | 2204 |
| 21 | 2038 |
What Else?
As I did in Belgium, I am working on some sillier projects here too. This blog post was already taking too long to put out there though, so I will keep that for a next post instead.