Walking Every Street in San Francisco | Hacker News Reader

Walking Every Street in San Francisco

sfwalkingman.com

157 pointswormold59 comments

> Call it an exercise in eccentricity or futility, and you'd probably be right.

The art geek in me sees this 'exercise in eccentricity or futility' a rather interesting activity. Yes, he walked every street, but as he said it himself:

> Nothing is forever, though. I can only claim to have walked every street in this city at this moment in time. New streets are being built as I write.

He has only walked through every street in SF as they currently stand. His prize is ephemeral. Tomorrow, a coffee shop will open and he won't have seen it. Heck, coffee shops probably opened in the timespan it took for him to finish his journey.

And yet, despite not being able to say "I have seen everything in SF" for long, he can still say "I have seen everything in SF at the moment I saw them". While this may seem a little obvious or silly, it shows how every experience we ever have is unique to us.

I apologize for ending with a cliché but my only conclusion is that the we live for the journey, not for the destination. Because when we reach our destination - when we have finally seen every building in SF - we realize what we have seen is gone, and new things took their place.

Something about that is incredibly interesting to me. And for some reason it makes me sad:

You cannot fully understand even a city. It takes too much time -- as soon as you understand one piece, the other pieces have changed.

Cities are small, in the grand scheme of things. When it comes to larger things-- states, nations, planets, there's no way you could ever fully understand them. All you can get is a tiny, ephemeral snapshot, stuck in time.

It's humbling to think about, and I don't really know why it makes me sad.

Likewise, you can't fully understand yourself, your friends, family or partner. As with the city, you gain what understanding you can from your experience with them.

This comment reminds me of a book by Italo Calvino. Probably my favorite of his. It's a collection of stories told by Marco Polo to Kublai Khan about cities in his domain. Somewhat fantastical, but strikes deep to the heart to transitory nature of cities and perception itself.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0156453800/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?qid=...

A few dazzling lines on wanderlust from Invisible Cities:

... Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches. ...

And Marco's answer to that: "Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have."

A related thought is what an unfathomable amount of information is being created all the time. For instance just on YouTube 300 hours of video are now uploaded every minute. Even if all you did was consume 24/7, you can never catch up and will always be falling hopelessly behind.

The dynamism of cities is one of their primary draws.

Most people don't want to live in an environment they fully understand. They want to live in one that is constantly developing, progressing, and providing fresh stimuli.

This is the author's last line:

Temporarily, though, I can say this: If you live in San Francisco, I've walked by your house.

Dunno if it's just me, but that idea struck me as hilarious.

I'd like to think the author has wrestled with the valid points you've mentioned, and has concluded that the only thing you can do about the inevitable march of time is to laugh in its face :)

It's like astronomy: you can look up and see it all at once, but what you see "now" is the just-arriving view of what happened minutes or billions of years ago. Getting a grasp on what constitutes "now" can be rather distressing when you really think about it.

In a semi-related, semi-off-topic way, there was this challenge of going through all the subway stations of the Paris underground, during the same day (and if possible in the fastest way possible):

http://www.madore.org/~david/misc/defimetro.html [FR]

The funny part was that they wrote a program to calculate and optimize the time to do that, using the length of the lines and the little public info they had; and I thought it was pretty cool. http://www.madore.org/~david/misc/metro.tgz

And of course, it was in 2002, so before the OpenData movements...

Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subway_Challenge , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tube_Challenge

It's also been attempted with buses:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-19254318

Some are probably trying with airlines too:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9916974

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8368727

When I visited Venice last year, I briefly considered whether I could cross all of its bridges at night while the city slept. But I quickly learned that many of the bridges are private, and I didn't really have a feasable way to plan a route in the few days I was there. I'm not even sure I can figure out what/where all the bridges are. It will have to remain for a future trip, should I ever go back.

OSM should at least have the necessary data. Planning a route that takes you over all accessible bridges is still a bit of work though.

Ha, a bunch of us in Dublin tried to work out the optimum route for breaking the current "Guinness Book of Records" record for most pubs visited in a pub crawl. Though one of the team got a decent enough method of working out the optimum route, unfortunately some guys smashed the record in New York. We were unable to match the density of pubs in the 24 hours allowed - I think we needed to be hitting one every four minutes or something like that. I really doubt that it can ever be done anywhere other than New York any more :(

I think Tokyo may be able to hold its own depending on the definition of 'pub'.

I was just thinking about Golden Gai! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinjuku_Golden_Gai

What's the Guinness requirement for a stop? Does everyone have to down a pint?

Seaside towns like Brighton or Blackpool in the UK would be good places to try.

Both have considerably smaller winter populations (~circa 150k) yet have ~280 and ~400 pubs respectively, and those pubs crowd the streets around the promenade and beach-front.

Brighton: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/search/pubs/@50.8227911,-0.138...

Blackpool: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/search/pubs/@53.8090219,-3.047...

I suspect the biggest problem in the UK would be the shadow of licensing hours meaning that the pubs are mostly closed during the 24-hour window.

Here is someone who bicycled every road in San Francisco. All tracked with GPS. http://rideallofsf.tumblr.com/

And someone who walked all of Berkeley, CA back in 2007. https://walkingberkeley.wordpress.com/

One of the biggest changes since he finished his walk is the residential conversion of Treasure Island, which is now open to the public, and home to over 1000 people, and even a few restaurants. Hopefully it's not quite as toxic as it was before. The Navy is still working on that part (as they still are down in the Hunters Point Shipyard).

http://sftreasureisland.org/news-release/us-navy-hosting-oct...

There's still a plan to develop it more intensely, although it's been delayed repeatedly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasure_Island_Development

http://sftreasureisland.org/development-project

Here is someone who walked every street in Manhattan: http://linkage.cpmc.columbia.edu/Manhattan_Walk/Walk.html

That's much easier.

Not immediately obvious to me. Manhattan is somewhat smaller (about 33 mi^2 vs. 46) and less hilly but I'm not sure that qualifies as "much easier." Frankly, I'd probably worry more about safety in some areas of upper Manhattan than within San Francisco city limits but I'm not sure how much of that is perception vs. reality.

In the same vein, see also Charles Fleming, who has been finding and mapping public staircases all over SF and LA: http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/episode-75-secret-stai...

This is cool. This person did something similar on a bike: http://rideallofsf.tumblr.com/ (go back a page or so, the project finished a while ago and it has since devolved into Strava drawings)

Cool :) reminds me of something similar with Manhattan: http://linkage.cpmc.columbia.edu/Manhattan_Walk/Walk.html

If you enjoy the idea you should read "The Cool Gray City of Love" by Gary Kamiya. He walked (almost) the entire city of SF and wrote wonderful chapters for most of SF's neighborhoods that also cover the history of the city.

I'd love an app to help me track this. Any know anything like this? Basically show a map of all the streets with the ones you've walked highlighted.

Walking around SF is my favorite thing in the city.

Strava.com will generate a heat map of all the roads you've walked (or biked) on. There is even a club that seeks to "Ride Every Road" of their local town.

http://www.strava.com/clubs/ride-every-road-22350

> Strava.com will generate a heat map of all the roads you've walked (or biked) on.

Warning - I think this is a premium-only feature.

I found OSMTracker, never used it though.

If you find one, please can you post?

A similar feat in Sydney, Australia, by an old codger who was walking to keep fit.

http://www.walksydneystreets.net/

Heh, i think after living in the Haight a bunch of years, i walked, ran, skated, rollerbladed and biked < 5% of the streets

This was good, vid on the steepest sidewalks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FisaHV2hQYc

I would have thought Market Street is the longest, although it changes its name from Market to Portola to Junipero Serra and then turns into 280.

The name change is because Market and Portola did not connect until about 1920 or so.

http://sflib1.sfpl.org:82/search?/dStreets+M/dstreets+m/1%2C... http://sflib1.sfpl.org:82/search?/dStreets+M/dstreets+m/1%2C... http://sflib1.sfpl.org:82/search?/dStreets+M/dstreets+m/1%2C... http://sflib1.sfpl.org:82/search?/dStreets+M/dstreets+m/1%2C...

I would have guessed Geary.

This reminds me of the novel Bleeding London by Geoff Nicholson from 1997. One of the characters is trying to walk every street of the London A-Z map. (http://www.amazon.com/Bleeding-London-Geoff-Nicholson/dp/057...)

It would be fun if he'd attached a camera to his head and then made the hundreds of hours of video available!

Only if you speeded it up.

I make that about 43TB of smartphone HD video, based on his stated walking distance and speed.

About $3,000 worth of disk drive space. Quite doable.

Where are the thousands of hours of GoPro video?

Things like this were cooler before StreetView.

I really like this. I could do the same for Barcelona. It will show nice views. I walked a lot, though, but not everything.

This is impressive! I wonder though, which street was his favorite? Or which neighborhood, at least.

a very cool accomplishment. it would be neat to see someone do this without the overlap of walking the same road twice.

It's likely not to be possible!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eulerian_path

I was going to argue that if every street had a sidewalk on both sides, then we could indeed construct an Eulerian path over sidewalks, but probably there are some streets without sidewalks on both sides.

I was thinking it was common for alleys to have no sidewalks at all, but I looked at quite a few with Google Street View, and many do have sidewalks after all (even on both sides!).

An example that I found which seems to have a sidewalk on only one side is Orange Alley, but it's complicated: sometimes the single sidewalk disappears entirely, and in tiny patches a sidewalk shows up on the other side. But I think the alleys probably will undermine your clever suggestion.

Eulerian path through SF? Sounds like a hard problem. :)

You may be thinking of Hamiltonian paths ;)

Not possible. There are > 2 intersections with an odd number of streets. (Note that this includes dead-end streets)

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