Last September, I got an idea for a weird and ambitious project. It was inspired by a project that Liz is doing: she’s visiting every single park in the city (she’s well over three quarters done by this point). I was riding my e-bike up Queen Anne and thought to myself, “What if I attempted to bike every street in the city?”
I mulled it over for a few days and mentioned it to Liz, and decided I would do some trial runs to see if it was feasible. After a handful of rides, I decided, “Yes, I am going to do this.”
So now I’m attempting to bike every street in the city. First, I had to establish some criteria for what streets are part of my project. They are:
- The street must have a name
- The street must be public
- The street must be legal for me to bike on
- The street must be paved or otherwise have a good surface to bike on
So with those criteria that means I-5 and I-90 are out, for example, as well as loose gravel roads, alleys, and private driveways. That being said, I’ll still bike an unpaved road in certain conditions, like if it’s packed-down dirt. And I might still bike a private road if it’s not behind a gate and at least looks like a public road.
I’m using two bikes on this: My e-bike and my hybrid bike. Their names are Electric Mayhem and Blue, respectively. I didn’t use Blue much at the beginning due to an asthma issue I was having in the fall, but once that cleared up, I’ve been using it frequently. Blue is also a lot easier to load onto a bus, too. Electric Mayhem is pretty vital for tackling the many steeps hills in Seattle.
As of today, I have done 68 individual rides for this project, biked 435 unique miles, 700 total miles, and climbed 50,000 feet in elevation. And I’m not even halfway done yet.
My progress looks like this as of today:
But you can view the real map here: https://www.google.com/maps/d/edit?mid=10eMG2mPRtbtfZ4ZNDvggGYG3kGk4_zau&usp=sharing
I’ll describe the tools I use and how I plan my routes in a separate post.
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