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Comment by krisoft | Hacker News Reader

Can someone who is familiar with Toronto say if this feels realistic to them? I understand the bits where the lines stick to the street grid, but some of the lines appear to be crossing blocks in a very clean and straight way.

Not saying it is not real but it is just a bit too clean to me. Even with extremely good planning i would expect that the lines would need to compromise sometimes to avoid buildings.

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For the diagonal lines the runner turned his GPS off at some points, and turned back on at another, causing Strava to fill in the missing data with a diagonal line

> For the diagonal lines the runner turned his GPS off at some points, and turned back on at another, causing Strava to fill in the missing data with a diagonal line

This part of Toronto also has laneways, so if you use the above feature, in combination with crossing through laneways that don't show up as streets at this level of zoom, you can perhaps get diagonal interpretation from Strava.

from his twitter/x acct, https://x.com/mccabedj/status/1860191515349504467 and https://x.com/mccabedj/status/1860192166561349753

    People were generally understanding when I walked through homes. But when it got inconvenient I just stoped/started the app to get Strava to draw B-line between the points

    Strava requires a run to be continuous. So I do the full run. And in post I trim off the extra bits to get the hat in the air

I live in Toronto and know who Duncan is. I can vouch he did this for real.

Toggling Strava pauses to get nice straight lines is definitely a bit of a trick to make it nicer.

This is literally in the article.

> When there are buildings in the way of a line he needs to draw, “I pause the app, then when I get to the desired destination, I resume,” he said. “When you un-pause, Strava runs a direct line between the two points.”

Doable for sure, however an incredibly boring running route.

> Doable for sure, however an incredibly boring running route.

The green patch in the head when the video starts is Christie Pits:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christie_Pits

The green patch by the right leg is:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_Bellwoods_Park

Both are nice, but the run would is done via Ossington on the left of the body:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ossington_Avenue

And Gorve Vale/Grace on the right of the body. Ossington would probably have decent street life.

Ossington has basically no street life from Bloor to Dundas. Once you get south of Dundas it gets very lively, but the northern stretch of Ossington is a bit bleak, as someone who has also run a lot in that neighbourhood.

Why do you say this? I used to live right in the center of the stick figure, and regularly did the loop up around Christie Pits or down around Trinity Bellwoods. Those streets are great for running, not boring at all.

I must confess, I looked at the map, looked at the streets, and even though I know exactly where that is as I live at Ossington and Dundas, my brain took spadina crescent on that map and somehow anchored it as the area next to the U of T circle to the east, so in my mind the map was all around the AGO... I dunno why.

may be just missing position samples from corners, end result is a shortcut line

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