Here’s an interesting article about another compulsive person walking all the streets in a Bay Area city. This guy walked every street in San Francisco, which has 1,200 miles of road, over the course of seven years.
The mileage of San Francisco’s streets surprised me, because I thought I’d read that Oakland, which covers a much larger geographical area than San Francisco, has only 800 miles of road. Oakland is much less dense than San Francisco, however, with streets less tightly packed together, so that probably explains it.
Interestingly, this man employed a trick I’ve heard from other walkers, which is to tackle bad neighborhoods in bad weather. Apparently thugs don’t like to get wet or cold.
It’s the kind of story that’s too good to spoil with verification--or even attribution: It’s said that an interviewer once asked Mick Jagger what he’d do if the rock ‘n’ roll thing ever fizzled out. “Well,” he supposedly said, “I guess it would be pretty cool to be a travel writer.”
2 comments:
I was surprised at the distance, too, because the SFMTA used to only claim 891 miles of streets. But the current Transportation Fact Sheet says 946 miles, plus 59 miles of freeway, 65 miles in parks, 12 miles in military facilities, and 6 miles of private streets, so it's closer to his number.
I am still only about 225 miles into San Francisco myself.
I guess there are a lot of ways to count it. I try not to backtrack too much when I walk, but inevitably I will have covered more than whatever the official number of miles is by the time I'm done.
I don't have a very good idea of how many miles of Oakland I've covered because I don't track the milage of every walk. I do mark the territory I've covered on a map, and I estimate that I'm about a quarter done with Oakland and it's been years already. It's definitely about the journey, not the destination!
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