How I Walked Every Block in Manhattan in 10 Weeks (2005)

This piece of trivia was funny to me:

> Most shocking discovery: The variation in the prices of Dunkin Donuts in different neighborhoods. I always order an extra large Vanilla coffee, and the price within Manhattan ranges from as low as $1.64 to as high as $2.57. In one neighborhood, I even saw two Dunkin Donuts within 0.25 mile of one another, both in a similarly depressed neighborhood, at which the price differed by 58 cents! Also shocking is how some of them add tax on top of the menu price while others do not. Amazing... I suggest the Dunkin Donuts index might be slightly more sensitive in general than the McDonald's Big Mac index so often used to compare cost of living to salary in different places!!!

Here's a map of Starbucks, McD's, and Dunkin Donuts in New York, based off of the city's health inspection records:

http://www.smalldatajournalism.com/projects/one-offs/fusion-...

Dunkin Donuts are so uniformly spread out (Starbucks is heavily clustered in lower Manhattan) I've always thought it'd be interesting to use them as some kind of marker of comparison...either between neighborhoods or between cities. I never thought the different franchises would have wildly varying prices.

An analogous feat [1] is being attempted in Pittsburgh by Tom7. He has lots of interesting graphics that he automatically generates from the data [2], which data-driven folks might find interesting, anyway. (Tom7 has been previously seen on HackerNews for other things, too. [3] [4])

[1] http://pac.tom7.org [2] http://pac.tom7.org/graphics.shtml [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8722192 [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5526670

Very cool! I've also kept track of all the streets I've biked or walked down in both Chicago and San Francisco, although I didn't set about it as rigorously as the author, nor did I ever complete them. But it is a fun exercise in motivating you to get out there and to see parts of the city you might otherwise miss.

The difficulty is finding new routes all the time; at first, it's pretty easy, but then you start needing to go further and further out of your way to hit new streets, and the directions get more and more complicated. I have often thought about making an app to do help you with this, but I don't know much about mapping data and how to best store and calculate routes.

Anyone else in NY inspired to do this? Most work days I'm only getting in 10k steps but I frequently break 25k and am looking to do that more regularly as I've got about as much weight to lose.

The weather is nice. This would be a cool thing to do with a group.

> Most steps in a single day: 72,351 (48 miles) on December 18

Nice; The Great Saunter is a 32 mile trip, and it took my friend 12 hours to complete it. Hard to imagine walking a full 48, especially in the middle of winter.

I'm kinda disappointed that he didn't develop an algorithm on how to do it in the least amount of steps.

Good work though and gratulations on the wight loss!

  > Now, On to the The South Bronx!!!

...and he was never heard from again.