What is CityStrides?
CityStrides turns your city into something with a finish line. Every street in OpenStreetMap is a string of points called nodes; you tick a node off by passing within 25 metres of it, and once you've hit 90% of a street's nodes the street goes green. Streets with fewer than 10 nodes are all-or-nothing — you need every one. A city's completion percentage is just streets completed divided by streets that exist, which is how you end up with a number next to your hometown and a sudden interest in the cul-de-sac you've driven past a thousand times.
Strava is the most common way in, and it's a one-way read: CityStrides pulls your activities across, and it has no feature that writes anything back to your Strava account. Connect once and your whole history comes with it — there's no cap on how far back it goes — but it arrives gradually, because Strava rate-limits how many API calls CityStrides can make per quarter-hour and per day, and historical backfill sits behind everyone's new activities in the queue. Ten years of running can take days to finish landing. After that, Strava's webhooks push each new run over as soon as you save it. Only running, walking and hiking sync; cycling activities are filtered out at the door. Garmin, Coros, Polar, Suunto, Runkeeper and MapMyFitness also connect, and you can attach more than one to a single account.
One caveat that isn't CityStrides' fault: since Strava's November 2024 API terms change, third-party apps can't show your Strava activity data to anyone but you, so activities you sync from Strava no longer appear on your profile to other Striders and their activity pages are blocked as if private. Your LifeMap and your street and city completion stats are aggregate data and stayed public. Worth knowing before you sign up: it's a website, not an app — there's nothing in the App Store, and people who want an icon just add it to their home screen — and it's been running since 2013 as, in its founder's own words, still a one person project.
Key Features
The node rule, applied to everything you've ever run
25 metres from a node counts it. That tolerance cuts both ways: you'll pick up nodes on parallel streets you never touched, and occasionally miss one on a street you definitely ran. The 90% threshold exists to absorb that.
LifeMap
Every activity you've ever synced, drawn as one layer. The free version caches in your browser and can choke on very large histories; the Supporter version adds date filtering, live location while you're out, and clickable individual activities, and it's rebuilt in the background each time an activity syncs.
Node Hunter
One button drops markers for every node you haven't completed in the current map view, so you can see exactly which half of which street you missed. Supporter feature, and the main reason most people pay.
Route Builder
Draw and save a route that's guaranteed to close out specific streets, then pull it up on your phone mid-run to stay honest. Also Supporter-only.
Hard Mode
Turns off the 90% rule and demands 100% of a street's nodes. You can set it per account, per city, or per challenge. Supporter-only, which is a funny thing to charge for and entirely in character.
Mark as manually complete
Some nodes sit in a pond, inside a building, or behind a locked gate. Rather than pretend otherwise, CityStrides lets you flag the street complete by hand from its page. The alternative is fixing the data in OpenStreetMap, where all of this comes from in the first place.
Priority processing
Syncing and street calculation are two separate queues, and Supporters go first in both. Free accounts get everything eventually; they just wait behind subscribers and new signups.
Who It's For
- Runners doing an "every street" project in one city, who need a scoreboard that updates itself
- Walkers and hikers, who count exactly the same as runners here — this is one of the few Strava tools where a walk is a first-class citizen
- People who like their maps to fill in, and will happily add a mile of grid to a run for the satisfaction
- OpenStreetMap tinkerers, who will fix a missing footpath upstream rather than argue with the app
