Run Every Street In Your City
The full plan for the run every street challenge: where it came from, a step-by-step guide, neighborhood strategy, the tracking tools compared, and a worked estimate for how long your specific city will actually take.
The Direct Answer
The run every street challenge is a completionist running goal where you try to run down every public street in your city until a tracking tool shows 100 percent coverage. It was popularized by ultrarunner Rickey Gates, who ran essentially every street in San Francisco over 46 days in late 2018. Today the challenge is tracked through apps like CityStrides and Wandrer.earth, which convert your GPS history into a live percentage-complete map of any city.
How long it takes depends entirely on your city size and weekly mileage aimed at new streets rather than repeat routes. A small town is realistic in 1 to 2 years. A major metro can take a decade unless you split it into districts. This guide covers the origin story, a 9-step how-to plan, neighborhood-by-neighborhood strategy, a comparison of the four leading tracking tools, and a worked time estimate table so you can size up your own city before you start.
Where The Challenge Came From
The modern run every street challenge traces back to one specific project. Here is how it started and how it turned into a category.
A cross-country run ends in San Francisco
In 2018, ultrarunner Rickey Gates finished a five-month, self-supported run across the United States that ended by crossing the Golden Gate Bridge into San Francisco. Instead of stopping, he turned the same obsession with covering ground toward a single city.
The challenge gets a name and a plan
Gates called the project Every Single Street and, with help from mathematician Michael Otte, worked out an efficient route through San Francisco's entire street grid so that consecutive days of running would not double back on already-covered ground any more than necessary.
46 days, over 1,300 miles
From November 1 to December 15, 2018, Gates ran essentially every public street in San Francisco, documented in a short film and widely covered by outlets including KQED and GearJunkie. The project reframed running as a way of truly knowing a place, not just logging miles.
The idea spreads beyond one runner
CityStrides existed before Gates' project but the publicity around Every Single Street turned "run every street" from a niche personal goal into a recognized category, and CityStrides became the default tool for tracking it because it converts your existing Strava history into a live percentage-complete map for any city.
Sources: KQED and GearJunkie.
How To Run Every Street: 9 Steps
- 1
Pick your boundary
Decide what "your city" means for the challenge. City limits, ZIP code, a specific neighborhood, or a custom radius from home. CityStrides and Wandrer both let you track progress against official municipal boundaries, which is the simplest default if you want a number you can compare with other runners.
- 2
Connect a tracking tool to your run history
Sign up for CityStrides or Wandrer.earth and connect your Strava account (both tools require it), or use an app like Motera that shows uncaptured territory directly in-app without needing a separate sync step. Your existing run history usually pre-fills a surprising percentage of streets before you even start deliberately targeting the challenge.
- 3
Get your baseline percentage
Most runners who have lived and trained in one place for a couple of years are already 15 to 40 percent complete before starting the challenge on purpose. Check your number first so you know what you are actually working toward.
- 4
Clear your immediate neighborhood first
Start with the streets within 1 to 2 miles of home. These are the cheapest to complete because you reach them with almost no transit mileage, and finishing a visible chunk of the map early builds momentum.
- 5
Expand neighborhood by neighborhood
Move outward in contiguous blocks rather than jumping across town. Pick one adjacent neighborhood, run its streets until it is functionally done, then move to the next one that borders it. This keeps almost every mile of every session counting.
- 6
Use long runs for far-flung clusters
Save your weekly long run for neighborhoods that are too far to reach efficiently on a short run. A 12 to 16 mile long run can clear an entire distant pocket of streets in one session that would otherwise require weeks of short trips.
- 7
Drive or transit to isolated street clusters
Some streets sit in industrial zones, cul-de-sac clusters, or isolated subdivisions with no efficient running path from home. It is faster and more sustainable to drive to the starting point, run the cluster, and drive back than to burn 5 miles each way just getting there.
- 8
Track your remaining percentage monthly
Check your completion percentage once a month, not every run. Checking too often turns a long-term project into a source of daily frustration since the percentage moves in small increments over years, not weeks.
- 9
Plan a closing run for the final streets
When you get down to the last handful of streets, plan a single dedicated run to close them out, the way Gates treated his whole project as one continuous campaign. Finishing on a specific, intentional run gives the challenge a real ending instead of it fading out unnoticed.
Every Street Becomes Territory.
A completion percentage checked after the fact is one way to play this challenge. Motera shows it happening live. Fog of war keeps your city greyed out until you physically run a street, so every session reveals new ground on the map in front of you instead of a number you check later. Free on iOS.
MoteraNeighborhood-By-Neighborhood Strategy
Random exploration feels adventurous but wastes mileage. These five habits are what separate runners who finish from runners who stall around 60 percent.
Zone your city into 6 to 10 chunks
Break your target area into neighborhoods or districts of roughly equal size before you start. Working through defined zones instead of an amorphous whole city makes progress visible and prevents the common failure mode of randomly running wherever feels good that week.
Run a lawn-mower pattern within each zone
Inside a neighborhood, run parallel streets in sequence the way a lawn mower cuts a yard, rather than zig-zagging. This minimizes the amount of distance spent re-crossing streets you have already completed to reach uncompleted ones.
Batch cul-de-sacs and dead ends together
Dead-end streets and cul-de-sacs are the least efficient part of any street-completion project because you run in and have to run back out. Cluster several of them into one dedicated run rather than adding a single detour into an otherwise efficient route.
Note the streets you keep re-running by accident
Runners naturally default to familiar streets on tired or low-motivation days. Periodically check which streets have the most repeat coverage in your tracker, since those are miles that are not moving your percentage and could be redirected to nearby uncompleted streets instead.
Treat the last 10 percent as its own project
The final stretch of any city is disproportionately made up of scattered, awkward, or far-flung streets, which is why most unfinished challenges stall in the 85 to 95 percent range. Budget specific runs for these instead of expecting them to get cleared incidentally.
Tracking Tools Compared
Four tools cover almost everyone attempting this challenge in 2026. Pricing and feature notes below are current as of mid-2026.
| App | Model | Price | Best For |
|---|---|---|---|
| CityStrides | Web app, requires Strava sync | Free tier, or $5/mo or $50/yr Supporter | Node Hunter route planning, city leaderboards, largest completionist community |
| Wandrer.earth | Web app, requires Strava sync | Free (last 50 activities), $40/yr for full history | Tracks every unique road and trail, not just city-limit streets, good for rural and trail runners |
| MoveMap | Native iPhone app, reads Apple Health on-device | Free tier, $1.99/mo, $9.99/yr, or $19.99 lifetime | Data never leaves your phone, no Strava account required, fastest setup |
| Motera | Native iOS app, GPS tracked live | Free | Fog of war reveals streets live while you run, no after-the-fact percentage checking, local rival leaderboards |
CityStrides and Wandrer both check completion after the fact against your Strava history. Motera is the only one of the four that reveals uncaptured streets live, in-app, while you run, which is a different way of playing the same challenge rather than a competing tracker.
How Long Will YOUR City Take?
The rough math: total unique street miles in your city, divided by the new miles you actually run each week. Most runners overestimate how many of their weekly miles are new streets, since habit pulls almost everyone back to familiar routes most days.
Years to Finish = Total City Street Miles / (New Miles Per Week x 52)
| City Size | Weekly New-Street Miles | Estimated Time |
|---|---|---|
| Small town (under 200 mi of streets) | 15 mi/wk new streets | 1 to 2 years |
| Mid-size city (500 to 1,000 mi) | 15 mi/wk new streets | 3 to 5 years |
| Mid-size city (500 to 1,000 mi) | 25 mi/wk new streets | 2 to 3 years |
| Large city (1,500 to 3,000 mi) | 25 mi/wk new streets | 5 to 8 years |
| Major metro (5,000+ mi) | 25 mi/wk new streets | 10+ years, or split by district |
These are illustrative estimates, not a guarantee. Actual time varies with street density, how much of your existing mileage already counts as complete, and how consistently you target new streets versus training routes.
5 Common Mistakes
Chasing distance instead of new streets
A 10 mile run on your usual loop adds zero percent to your completion score. A 3 mile run through a brand new subdivision can add more. Once you understand the challenge is about unique coverage, not mileage, your route choices change immediately.
Checking your percentage every single run
The completion percentage moves in fractions of a point on most runs. Checking constantly turns a multi-year project into a source of daily disappointment. Check monthly and let the number surprise you.
Ignoring dangerous or unpleasant streets until the end
Highway shoulders, industrial roads with no sidewalk, and streets with no safe crossing get skipped by almost everyone until they are the only thing left. Address a handful of these early, at a safer time of day, rather than saving all of them for a discouraging final stretch.
Not accounting for street name and boundary quirks
Some tracking tools split a single physical road into several tracked segments where it crosses jurisdiction boundaries, or merge two differently-named streets that are physically continuous. Spot-check a few completed streets against the live map early so a mapping quirk does not quietly stall your percentage for months.
Trying to run every street in one linear pass
Rickey Gates could dedicate 46 consecutive days to San Francisco because it was a planned campaign, not a background hobby. Most runners are fitting this challenge around a job, training plan, and life. Treating it as a background project you chip away at for years, rather than something you owe daily progress to, is what actually gets it finished.
A Runner Who Actually Finished
In January 2026, Bend, Oregon runner Micah Tuttle completed a five-year project running every street in his city. Tuttle moved to Bend in 2021 and used CityStrides to track progress block by block, running new streets over the following years while meeting people and learning about the town along the way, a project covered by Central Oregon Daily.
Tuttle's project is the realistic version of this challenge for most people: not a 46-day sprint like Gates in San Francisco, but a background project stretched across years of ordinary training, finished by steady accumulation rather than a dedicated block of time off. Both approaches are valid. Pick the one that fits your actual schedule rather than the one that sounds more impressive.
Finding New Streets To Run
Strava's own editorial team publishes route-discovery guidance that is useful even if you never open the app to log a run, particularly the Find New Routes Near You piece on browsing Strava's global heatmap to spot streets other runners frequent but you have not covered yet. Pair that with Motera's own route generator to plan a specific loop through your next uncompleted neighborhood before you leave the house, rather than deciding turn by turn.
If your struggle is less "which streets" and more "I keep quitting on this like every other running goal," pair the challenge with a running streak tracker so the daily habit and the multi-year completion goal reinforce each other instead of competing for motivation.
Do You Need a Route-Optimizing Tool?
Beyond the tracking tools above, a small number of projects try to actually solve the routing problem, generating the shortest possible path that still covers every street, rather than leaving the order up to you. Here is how the three most-mentioned ones actually compare, since they are not interchangeable.
everystreetchallenge.com: a genuine routing algorithm
Built by developer Matej Kerekrety, this is an actual mathematical route optimizer, not just a tracker. It pulls a city's street data from OpenStreetMap, models it as a graph, and solves a version of the Chinese Postman Problem, the same class of routing problem used for mail delivery and street sweeping, to output the shortest single route that covers every street at least once. Feed it a city or neighborhood boundary and it hands back a concrete turn-by-turn route rather than a percentage-complete number.
RunAllTheStreets: documentation, not an algorithm
It is worth being precise here: RunAllTheStreets is a personal project and blog, originally centered on one runner's own street-by-street coverage of Pittsburgh, not a route-optimization tool. Each qualifying run that covers new street, alleyway, or stairway ground earns a numbered "RATS" badge, and the site documents the neighborhoods and history encountered along the way. It is a genuinely useful source of inspiration and real-world pacing for what a multi-year project looks like, but it does not generate a route for you the way everystreetchallenge.com does.
Motera's approach: no pre-computed route at all
Motera does not try to solve the shortest-route problem upfront. Instead, fog of war shows you which nearby streets are still uncaptured in real time as you run, so you make the routing decision yourself, turn by turn, based on what is actually greyed out on the live map in front of you. This trades the mathematical efficiency of a pre-computed Chinese Postman route for something an algorithm cannot give you: a reason to check the map again tomorrow, since captured ground can be contested and re-explored, not just permanently marked done.
The honest takeaway: if you want the mathematically shortest path through your city, everystreetchallenge.com is the only one of the three actually built for that. If you want inspiration and a realistic sense of pace, RunAllTheStreets is a good read. If you want a daily reason to run that also happens to reveal new streets, that is what Motera is for.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the "run every street" challenge?
It is a completionist running goal where you try to run down every public street in a defined area, usually your home city or town, and track your progress until every segment is marked complete. It was popularized by ultrarunner Rickey Gates, who ran all 1,300-plus miles of San Francisco streets over 46 days in late 2018, and it has since become a standing category of challenge tracked by apps like CityStrides and Wandrer.
How long does it take to run every street in a city?
It depends entirely on total street mileage and how many miles a week you dedicate to new streets versus repeat routes. A small town with 150 miles of streets is realistic in 1 to 2 years running 3 days a week. A mid-size city with 800 to 1,500 miles can take 3 to 6 years. A dense major city can take a decade or more unless you run high weekly mileage specifically aimed at unclaimed streets. The worked estimate section below shows the math.
Do I need a special app to run every street?
You do not strictly need one, but a tracking tool is what turns a vague goal into a measurable one. CityStrides is the most widely used tool because it turns your Strava history into a live percentage-complete map per city. Wandrer.earth does the same for any unique road or trail, not just city limits. Motera takes a different approach: it reveals your city as fog of war live in the app while you run, so you see uncaptured streets in real time instead of checking a percentage after the fact.
Does the street have to be 100 percent covered to count?
It depends on the tool. CityStrides marks a street complete once you have covered roughly 90 percent of its mapped nodes on the free tier, and offers a stricter 100 percent "Hard Mode" for Supporter subscribers. Wandrer counts a road or trail segment as done the first time any portion of it appears in your GPS data. There is no universal rule, so pick one measurement standard and stay consistent, otherwise your percentage complete will jump around depending on which tool you check.
Should I run every street in order, or randomly?
Neighborhood by neighborhood is faster than random exploration. Runners who jump around the city waste mileage traveling to and from disconnected pockets of uncompleted streets. Clearing one neighborhood fully, then moving to an adjacent one, keeps almost every mile of every run counting toward new streets instead of transit miles to reach them.
What is the fastest way to find which streets I have not run yet?
CityStrides Supporter includes a Node Hunter route planner built for exactly this, generating a route through your nearest uncompleted streets. Wandrer has a similar route-planning extension for its paid tier. If you are not using either, the manual method is opening your city map at a zoomed-in level, marking off streets you know you have covered from memory or Strava history, and circling clusters of unmarked streets to target on your next long run.
Can walking count toward a run every street challenge?
Most tracking tools accept any GPS-tracked activity, running or walking, since the goal is street coverage, not pace. CityStrides and Wandrer both ingest walks the same way they ingest runs. If your personal goal is specifically a running challenge, that is a rule you set for yourself, not something the tools enforce.
Has anyone actually finished running every street in their city?
Yes, and it happens more than people expect once a city is small or mid-sized. In January 2026, Bend, Oregon runner Micah Tuttle finished a five-year project running every street in Bend using CityStrides to track progress, a case study covered in the completionist story section below. Rickey Gates finished all of San Francisco in 46 days in 2018 by running it as a dedicated block of time rather than a background hobby, which is the opposite strategy but proves both approaches work.
