Biking every road in west Los Angeles
In 2019, I started trying to live most of my day-to-day life without a car. My reasons for doing so are probably worth a whole separate blog post, but the result is that six years later, I'm a person who owns a car in Los Angeles but deliberately commutes, shops, visits my friends, etc. with a bicycle instead.
I'll use the car if the weather outside is dangerous to me (only a handful of days a year), if we're visiting family in neighboring cities, or if we need to transport a lot of canned food… but otherwise I'm a bicycle commuter by choice.
But of course, because I'm me, I've also turned biking into a game.
A long time ago, I published a blog post on this blog about my experience playing Ingress, a map-based ARG I played in the Bay Area… but dropped cold when I came to LA. Since then, I've played quite a lot of Pokemon Go, which I also dropped cold when the game's pricing changed.
I love this genre. I'm an urban explorer at heart, and I love wandering around on foot or on two wheels in a place I'm unfamiliar with. (Those mobile games also let me make number go up, which is one of my favorite things to do.) But Ingress and PoGo required me to actively look at my phone while walking, which is a bit of a bummer. And they also forced me to deal with free-to-play design, which does on some level shatter the fantasy of deep involvement in any game, for me. It matters less when I'm playing, you know, a digital game, but I find it quite disruptive when I'm playing a game in the real world.
And fundamentally, both of those games also require multiplayer communities to be truly entertaining. That's a plus for a lot of live game operators who want to induce FOMO and peer pressure… but a minus for an adult like me with a lot going on in their life. I've lost my multiplayer communities for both of those games over the years.
So I was delighted to discover wandrer.earth, the simplest and most basic map game I've ever had the luck to discover. It's just a competition to see who can bike or walk the highest percentage of road miles in any given OpenStreetMap neighborhood region. If you subscribe to the game at a flat yearly fee, you can get points bonuses for topping monthly leaderboards–so you can choose to compete on those if you want. But it's otherwise a solitaire game. You versus the map. Number go up. That's pretty much all I want.
I'm currently planning to bike the entire west side of Los Angeles. It's a target I'll never hit, because some of those roads are too dangerous, and I've decided I'll never bike on them... but I'll do as many as I can. The journey is teaching me a lot about how to commute on a bike in my area, and it's unbelievably satisfying to complete an entire neighborhood–or to push it above 90%, at least, which rewards you with a ton of leaderboard points.
The points bonuses for completing 25%, 50%, 75%, 90%, and 99% of various regions provide a small amount of of strategic texture to the leaderboard battle. Hitting 90% will basically double your miles points for an area, which allows you to climb points-based leaderboards with fewer total miles than other riders. This means that I can either focus on getting as many miles as possible, or on completing neighborhoods as completely as possible. I'm currently a completionist–I love to search for little scraps of road I've missed, then plan my missions in a GPS route planning app, just like I'm planning a route across a map in a videogame.
I mostly do these trips at night to avoid car traffic. It means I've seen loads of the west side in darkness, but never in daylight. But I get to enjoy the eerie-yet-serene quality of the beach paths at night, and the giant clown in Venice looming up at me out of the fog, and the weird uneasy fellowship you can feel with other people who are roaming around the city at midnight. Nighttime in certain parts of Los Angeles has this quality of profound unhingedness, where everyone knows that if you're out and about, you're probably extremely weird, extremely messy, or somehow not all right… I know that people have seen me huffing and puffing up their culdesac at 1 in the morning and have had those thoughts about me, for sure. But if they're out watching me, they're weird as hell, too.
I've never felt that a human on foot intended me harm while I was out at night, though I have had worrying encounters with people in cars, and with dogs. But despite all the time I've spent out at night over the last year and half, nothing actually bad has happened to me. So I can, actually, wholeheartedly recommend doing this kind of thing. If you can bike on the road, you can do this, and you'll learn a lot about your neighborhood. You'll become a more confident cycle commuter, you'll learn new routes through your area, and you'll understand your community in a way you can't in a car. And if you can't bike, you can walk--and have a lot of the same experiences.
Motorcyclists are right: cars are cages. They keep you from really seeing what's really going on in the street, both practically, and like, spiritually, if that makes any sense. The things that are rancid about LA, the cars and the isolation and the arrogance and the trash, are so much more rancid when you're on a bike. But you make so many more human connections when there's no glass and metal between you and other people. You can stop whenever you want to explore something, or to get a snack, or to slip between the buildings and check out something weird.
I eat so much more good food now that I bike places. I never have to worry about parking. Every time I'm on a trip, I note down new coffee shops I see, and on the weekends I drag my husband to visit them. I can stop and take pictures of art I see, or funny signs, or weird cars. I have found parks and even entire neighborhoods I never knew existed. Our life is a lot more textured now that we both bike commute. A game like wandrer is perfect for adding to that texture.
It's eye-opening in other ways, too. You start to see the graffiti and the stickers as their creators intended them to be seen, as works of art or soul-screams. They're going, "I was here!!" On a bike, you might start feeling the same need to make yourself known. Riding a bike on every road in your town will put you in a very intense, physical struggle with your environment. The city policies which endanger you will become extremely obvious. The poor road design and the indifference of your city officials will be impossible to miss. The oppressive limitations which car-centric infrastructure puts on children, the elderly, and disabled people who cannot drive will become extremely obvious to you. You will start to feel a connection with the people around you which you simply cannot feel while navigating the world in a car.
Biking has been a transformative and political pastime for me, as well as a fun, silly, number-go-up obsession. I am glad to have a new weirdness for my friends to joke about. I've also become absurdly strong, much stronger than I ever really believed I could be, without visiting a gym or "working out" at all. I'm just traveling! I'm seeing the city! And by god, I'm topping the leaderboard, too. I'm currently in 10th place by points on the west side of LA, with 37% of total miles collected after only a year and a half of playing this "game." That's 572 miles!
If you use Strava, I recommend hooking up the free version of wandrer.earth to your Strava account and checking it out. It's also possible to use by manually uploading GPX files to Strava, but you'll need to have a bike computer for that, or at least a phone app which records GPX. If we're mutuals and you'd like to see my absurd Strava behavior, hit me up–I'd love to show you the deranged shit I get up to when I'm collecting miles for this game!