Biking and Walking everywhere

CityStrides - focusses exclusively on "foot" activities (runs and walks). Signing up with the referral link gets you a free 7 day trial of "reporter" feature. What I find most useful is the "node finder". This lets you zoom into areas of a map and quickly find areas you have not yet covered. When starting an area, this is of little value. However, when getting the last little bits, it can be extremely helpful.

CityStrides bases coverage on "nodes" extracted from Open Street Maps. These nodes are generally any place where there is an intersection or a curve in the street. With a tight grid pattern, the nodes are often just at the intersections. This means that you can get credit for a street just by doing half the grid. (e.g. you can run all the East-West and get "free" credit for the North-South ones.) Technically, you could be able to "see" the rest of the street, so I don't have a problem with it.

Your main goal is to get "streets" in a city. In normal mode, getting 90% of the nodes in a street gives you credit. (In supporter mode, you can also do "hard mode" to require 100%). You can also manually match streets if needed. A street is defined as something with the same name in the same city. Small cul-de-sacs count as a street as do 10 mile long arterials. In a city like Seattle with a strict cardinal naming system, the same "street" can start and end multiple times through the city in non-connected segments. You may think you completed the street, but didn't realize there was another chunk of it elsewhere. CityStrides does have the ability to "Go" to a street and see all the nodes included. CityStrides does include cardinal directions, so a street like "145th" will have separate streets for "North 145th", "Northeast 145th" and "Northwest 145th". In Seattle, 145th is also on city border, so you can get credit, there is credit for them on both Seattle and Shoreline (as well as a bit of Lake Forest Park.) 3.5 miles down that street gives you 7 streets, while 5.5 down 3rd Ave NW gives you 1 street. (You do get a Shoreline node at the end, but that street picks up again later in Shoreline.) Meanwhile, there are a few other isolated nodes that are a complete street for less than a tenth of a mile.

Premium can be purchased for $5/month with no commitment. I like this approach and have used it - primarily for the node finder. CityStrides is also strickly web based, but has a web "App" that can be installed on the phone, 

Wandrer - tracks both bike and foot events. It includes coverage for individual neighborhood units. Rather than track nodes, it tracks entire streets. The map allows you to explicitly call out roads that you have not seen. I like this approach for viewing neighborhood coverage. For regular users, when you sign up, it will only import the last 50 events. Premium membership ($30/year) gives you a complete import. (All new activities are added.) I held off on this for the simple challenge. I wanted the chance to try to cover areas that I have not covered recently. 

I find wandrer to be both slick and confusing. The map and the points system can be a little weird.

Activities Map - This is my github project for mapping all of my strava activities. It also lets me keep a complete local backup of all activities. I like using it to slice and dice versions of activities that I then upload to google my maps. Then I can have them appear on my regular google map display. I like to use it to look at my "range" of paths. I can see a long continuous path. I can also place all my activities on a map without any background which makes a nice view.

Strava - I record most activities on my Garmin watch, but upload them all to Strava. I have had a paid membership at times. It is nice to create a record of activities and respond. I have included activities recorded from my phone and other old tracks I had. This makes it much more complete than the Garmin activities. I also track shoes, names, etc. from Strava.