Back on the road miles grind
I have started trying to complete road miles coverage for neighborhoods and cities in the LA area again.
I posted about this previously, but I've been using the website wandrer.earth to track my % road coverage of various Open Street Maps-defined areas in Los Angeles for a while. I got nearly to 100% of several westside neighborhoods, and as of Sunday I'm at a total 42% of the roads in the West Side of LA.
I took some time off from deliberately gridding it up on the streets, but I'm back at it again because it turns out that this is actually a lot of fun. It's a great way to induce yourself to go bike in neighborhoods you normally wouldn't.
One of the areas in LA I'd normally never go is northern Santa Monica. This is a fancier part of the city, with a lot of extremely expensive single family homes. I did the entire belt of northwest-southeast roads between Wilshire and Montana on Sunday. The picture above shows that part of my trip. It ended up being about 25 miles of grid-based biking in Santa Monica alone, never mind the biking I also did to get to and from this location.
I find this kind of biking contemplative... you can really knock out a bunch of podcasts over the course of a three hour bike ride! It's also a good way to familiarize myself with different neighborhoods in the area. Looping up to Montana every block let me stick my head into an expensive shopping neighborhood along that street that I normally have zero reason to ever visit. It was definitely illuminating to go see the part of LA where a live cello serenades people at a... Tuscan wine bar, or whatever.
LA is gigantic and you can go your entire time in the city without visiting a neighborhood like this, if it's not interesting to you. I think I've visited this neighborhood only once previously, and I've lived within about eight or so miles of it for nine years! I think I also rode my bike through here with a group ride at around 2 AM once last summer... hard to tell.
I am planning a future trip where I return to do north-south grid riding in the neighborhood north of Montana, which is an even wealthier area with even larger homes, and a "sundown town" history with extensive redlining.
I'll also have to return to this south of Montana neighborhood to do the east-west roads at some point. Luckily, I won't have to spend any of that time chasing scraps in the north-south part of the grid. I like to plan these little trips to cover entire neighborhoods at once for wandrer because it allows me to use my biking time more efficiently and get a larger number of completed road miles per trip. If I cover a neighborhood in a more patchwork way, I'm more likely to leave little scraps of road uncovered here and there. It's a real pain to have to bike 12 miles just to get .2 miles of uncovered roadway.
If you're looking for a reason to force yourself to bike in places you wouldn't normally go, I highly recommend wandrer as both a biking experience and as a kind of videogame. I plan these routes ahead of time using mapping software, and it's an experience that feels an awful lot like the kind of gameplay I engage in with certain open world adventure games. It has scores, leaderboards, player-set objectives, and multiple different ways to "succeed".
This ride took me from 40 to 42% of the west side. I made the number go up. Delightful.