Capitol Hill Streets Missed in 10 Months

I love visiting places: seeing a new place and learning something.   It's why i love to travel to far away countries and why i love to bicycle in the city.  I get a huge thrill from just being in a place, any place, every place.

I've always loved maps, maps are such an amazing representation of real world data.  I love maps so much.  i have to admit in addition to the honor of being somewhere and the thrill of learning, there is a bit of an urge for checking off boxes too. I'm a collector.

As a kid, i loved coloring in states, counties and countries i visited -- i still do in fact.  And maps to me, are just screaming out YOU COULD BE HERE!   A street map is just a graphical set of places to be, to see, to learn about.  To color in!   Maps are to be drawn on.  When i was in high school i bought a map of my city and a felt tip marker and tried to keep track of every street i had bicycled on.  And later i got another which i colored in with every street i had been on in a car.  I covered quite a lot of the city.  I loved being there.

As i moved to Seattle, I started a streets bicycled on map, on paper with felt marker.  I kept it up for a long time.  I don't know how accurate that was and i eventually stopped coloring it in.  And any motivation towards completeism i ever had, any interest in being on EVERY street, was trumped by my belief in the reality, and beauty, of imperfection.

But i still wonder how many streets in Seattle i have bicycled on, how many i have missed. I'm always excited when i ride on a new street or new block.I know there are neighborhoods that i have probably covered almost completely in the last 20 years. When i first got my Washington Topo(tm) map software as a gift, back in about 2002, my first thought was to start coloring streets.   But i was too busy and didn't have the patience.  

What i did do however, was draw in bike rides.   Frequently at the end of a ride i would draw it on the map afterward.  I saved those over the years.  A couple of years ago my friend Kent gave me an old GPS unit, and since then i often take it on bike rides with me so it will draw my route on the map when i get home.  Sometime last fall i unconsciously got in the habit of drawing, either freehand, or with the GPS, my bike ride EVERY DAY.  Sometimes i would post them on this blog at the end of a ride.

Then in April i started merging them together into a full month of riding map for each month; this is fun because it shows a big mess of rides and that data shows where i go often, rarely, and not at all.  Today i combined all of my rides for October into one file and then merged that into the 2011 year to date file. 
 

It showed me that i've covered a lot of central Seattle. I've covered almost all of downtown.  I haven't ridden as much in Wallingford or Ballard as i have in past years, i've covered the bike trails and main routes around town, and ridden many different routes south to Bike Works.  This map is cropped so it doesn't show the routes i've taken outside of the city (i tried to post that, but the lines just weren't visible they were so small).  But there is something that really jumps out on this map. The large group of neighborhoods that make up Capitol Hill are so thoroughly covered that it's a solid mass.  I had to take a closer look at that.

Wow!  When i blew it up i immediately could see that from I-5 to 19th Ave E and from Madison Street to Interlaken Park i had only missed a few blocks.  So i made a map with only the missed blocks drawn in.

 

So without trying, with out even a thought, i've cycled almost every block in this 2 square mile neighborhood in just the first 10 months of the year. And that's only counting the rides that i drew in.  There are a few, such as the cemetery, that i know i did, but didn't get drawn in.

Since i'm only left with a couple dozen out of the 1,000 or so blocks in the area, i'm left with a quandary: should i just go about my daily business, not thinking about this and see how many of the red blocks i cover normally in the next two months, or should i set out exploring, see places i haven't seen in awhile, or have never seen, bicycle even more in my city. There is certainly a voice inside of me suggesting it is somehow more PURE if i don't go out of my way, but of course i can't resist the opportunity to explore. 

Check back at the end of November and again at the end of the year for an update.

UPDATE (end of November):
I covered many of the missed streets this month.

Purple streets are blocks i rode this month, but had not for the first 10 months of 2011.  Red blocks are still missing.  Yellow blocks are not drawn in but i'm pretty sure i have ridden them.  I'll do them again.  And the X's are blocks that the map says exist that don't really exist.

A lot of these that i 'filled in' this month, i covered in my daily travels, but quite a few i went out of my way to experience. In at least one case i took some friends along on a ride home from BikeWorks covering a section of 13th Ave E.

 I had fun plotting routes and exploring.  And it was good motivation to get out and ride.  I'm pretty sure that i had been on all of these streets in previous years, all but one or two blocks looked familiar.  A few more in December and i can call it a complete coverage year!


UPDATE (December 11):
This afternoon on my way home from running errands near the University i covered the few blocks connecting to 19th Ave that i had missed and then when i looped down the dead end on Pike St off of 18th i completed my fun task of picking up the few missing streets on Capitol Hill, so i covered every block of every street in every neighborhood on Capitol Hill in 2011.