Updated October 2022
In 2016 I thought it would be a fun ‘side quest’ in life to walk as much of the world as possible. Since then, I’ve GPS-tracked 25,000 miles of walking, roughly the circumference of the planet, and I add about 5,000 miles every year.
To log the data, I use an iPhone app (currently Arc) to passively track me in the background 24/7. This is much easier than manually tracking it, and the data also serves as evidence that I walked all these streets. To visualize my walks, the exported JSON data is sent through a custom program that strips out all non-walking travel types, and then is visualized using this tool.
At first I considered literally going the ‘every street’ route, in which I cross off every street of a given city. I haven’t fully abandoned this goal, but the thought of endless residential neighborhoods and frequent dead ends makes the idea unappealing. The goal of this project is to enjoy the experience, and doubling-back on a cul-de-sac is not fun. So at the moment, this project’s goal is to walk (and run) every ‘interesting street’ of my favorite cities.
I’m still deciding what approach I want to take to sharing this data. The drawback here is privacy, so I’ve abandoned plans to make an interactive world map. For now I’ll just manually update this page with a few of my favorite maps, like some sort of art project.
New York City
San Francisco
Los Angeles
Austin
Mexico City
Oaxaca
Tulum
Victoria
Nice/Monaco
