Ride every road

Ha. What would you do without me? :)

This is a great idea. I might try this in Oxford. I've already done the ring road and all the main roads from the ring road to the centre so now I could start working on filling in each section like a giant Trivial Pursuit game.

Update: I got a Wandrer email this week saying I've done 44.9% of Greater London's apparently 24,210km of roads. Most rides, which are usually a couple hours, I get about 15km of new roads. Doesn't look like I'm going to run out of things to do any time soon. Still have unridden areas within a 25min ride away from home. My strava rides with RER in the title have gone over the 700 mark.
For London, Jonathan France is on 61.2%!

Generated a new heat map the other day after a particularly big RER ride in Ilford on the weekend.
Making progress outside of the A406, mainly on the western half. Almost up to the M25 at Uxbridge, but not quite yet. Can see tiny clusters in the map at Potter's Bar, Romford, Croydon and Slough/Windsor.
Progress feels to be slowing, especially as the circumference expands. Still finding every ride to be interesting and completely unique. Notice odd things, like foxes in an area north of Mitcham, their tails have all been half chopped off. SUVs are everywhere. Cycle infra is a joke. There are excellent unexpected little gravel paths all over. Laughing gas is very popular in boring suburbia, and now comes on larger containers rather than little canisters.
Pity can't share the entire heat map proper, hard to show the granularity in one screenshot.

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This is ridiculous! I can’t get my head around the planning!!

Impressive, keep it up!

Good thing about this is I don't do any planning, just look for somewhere I've never been and wing it. Much easier than tiling!

Ha as I’m currently looking to see where the closest missing tile is 🤦🏼‍♂️

Awesome.

Ricky Gates on his Run Every Road in SF a little while back. Interesting to hear how there's no best way to do these.
https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5zaW1wbGVjYXN0LmNvbS96OHlkQVlORQ/episode/YjRiODRhMjEtM2EyYi00OTNiLWEzMDctODQ2YmU2YzIxZjFk?ep=14

Is that true? They talk about improvements to the Traveling Salesman algorithm. Sounds like there kinda is a best way to do these. Obviously it will depend on your parameters somewhat, like what is "knowing a city".

It's complicated, and incomplete data doesn't help. Plus an algorithm dealing with efficiency would struggle even more with subjective things like working out what feels good just riding around on bike. I'm sticking with the 'good enough' approach.
https://youtu.be/GiDsjIBOVoA

Coming up with the minimal solution for a specific TSP like problem is incredibly computationally expensive.

Coming up with something that is very close to the optimal/minimal solution is quite cheap computationally.

The difference in the two terms of doing rides/runs like this is pretty much insignificant compared to real world variables let alone the human effort of the challenge itself.

Latest heatmap of just my ride every road rides.

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Noticed on Wanderer that I've just gone over 50% of Greater London's roads: 12,134km done of 24,156km. Jonathan France is now over 70%!

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Absolutely bonkers

Chapeau

Such a cool thing to have done/be doing.

Update: Jonathan France just went over 75% for all of Greater London. Hard to get ones head around that.
I've been doing some big ones in amongst the 'regulars', such as the cars parks and wastelands north of Heathrow and some of Erith. The start of the edges, the even more grimy and/green bits.
And an American I met recently has started, and is documenting his rides very nicely. His goal is to cover the original London postal district (ambitious):
https://www.instagram.com/bike.every.street/feed/?hl=en

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This is great, spent the time I normally go out for a ride looking at it. The Wandrer link to Strava is recommended. Although small bits, that get picked up on Activities, are not going to Big Map, which for completeness is a bit annoying. Because I put my walks and runs on Strava, which I do more of when on holidays my map looks more covered.
@Ruserius thanks for the idea and links.

I'm off the bike for at least another 3 weeks. So we're going to walk the Seven Sisters again this weekend. #csb

Since I started this there have been a number of advancements in aids for planning, tracking etc this kind of thing. As I don't plan any rides, I find strava maps is excellent for quick checks when out and about. I saw you can set heat maps by date so looked what mine is for the past 4 years, which is mostly after having completed inside north/South circular. Can see how much on the western half outside the circular, but also nodes around Elizabeth line out NE and SE which I started using the past few months. On track to get up to 55% of all of Greater London this year.

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Crazy stuff. Love seeing the progress

Great work

Wow, this is wild.

I only discovered Wandrer this year and have only been out riding specifically to cover new roads the past month or so.

One thing that I’ve found that’s a bit frustrating is that sometimes I’ll ride a path or a road and a little bit of it will remain red on the Big Map meaning I have to go back to the area again. Does anyone have any hints or tips to avoid this?

I’m 42% of Edinburgh. I’d like to beat the person at the top of the leaderboard who’s at 55%.

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Wandrer

God, not another "thing".

I've seen it on Strava - is it a Strava plugin or something?