Biking Every Seattle Street: Tools and Route Planning

I track my routes on Strava. This gives me a map of what I’ve done when I ride, and also gives me useful data, namely distance travelled and elevation gain. When I’m done, I go over my custom map on Google Maps and add all the lines from my ride on the streets that I hit for the first time. This is where I calculate how many “unique miles” I ride: all the streets that I ride for the first time for this project. When you add a line in Google Maps, you can click on the line to see what the distance was. I add those together to find my unique miles for a route. It’s imprecise, but it works.

I track all the rides in a spreadsheet, including links to the individual rides in Strava. This is where I keep track of my statistics. This data is mostly for fun, but there’s also a few metrics I can keep an eye on. For instance, if my unique miles in a ride are less than half of the total miles for a ride, that’s an indication that I’m not planning my routes efficiently and should seek to make some improvements.

When I plan my routes, I usually select the area I want to bike in, and then I look at the map and try to find the furthest distance I can reasonably go within the time constraints of my ride. I then choose a route that maximizes distance travelled on new streets to go there and back. There’s a few tricks I can do to minimize redundant miles while doing this, such as looking for shortcuts through greenbelts or over public staircases. For a project of this scope, it’s extremely important to plan for efficiency – so doing tricks like that can save a lot of time and energy. I’ve also been using the bus lately to expand my range: route 40 has been really convenient for letting me get to places like Bitter Lake in a lunchtime ride. I’m intentionally avoiding Magnolia and Queen Anne: I’m saving them for when I start working from the office again.

The only problem with using Google Maps for route planning is they mark a lot of things that look like streets but aren’t actually streets: alleys, parking lots, and private driveways show up in Google Maps. I should probably use the official city map in my planning as well (even though it’s a little out-of-date).

Occasionally, Liz will take the kids out to a part of town that’s difficult for me to get to on a bike from my house. On those occasions, I’ll take a bike along and concentrate on a small area. I usually try to focus on the furthest-away place from my house as I can. This is why most of the southern part of Seattle is currently filled with dense splotches where I’ve biked every street.

Check out the dense areas I’ve biked in West Seattle, Fauntleroy, South Park, Lake City, and Seward Park – to contrast with the green and red area near the top, which looks more like how I bike areas with daily lunchtime rides.

So that’s basically how I’m doing it. Now it’s just a matter of doing all the rides. Weather should be nice this coming week so I’m hoping for a lunchtime ride every day.