What "run every street" actually means

The idea is simple and slightly obsessive: run down every street within an area until the map is completely filled in. That area might be your neighbourhood, your postcode, your whole city, or - for the truly committed - an entire borough.

A few unwritten rules most people follow:

  • A street counts once you have run its full length, not just touched one end.
  • Out-and-backs are fair game for dead ends and cul-de-sacs.
  • It has to be under your own power. Driving down a street to tick it off is considered cheating.

The appeal is that it turns familiar training into exploration. You end up running roads you have driven past for years and never once set foot on.

The tools people use

Several services exist to score this challenge:

  • CityStrides is the best known. It's a web app that connects to Strava, Garmin, or Runkeeper and tracks your completed streets and a lifetime map. Powerful, but browser-based, and your activities live on its servers.
  • Wandrer gamifies covering new ground, including for cycling, and shows the percentage of an area you have explored.
  • Squadrats and StreetFerret take similar grid- or street-based approaches.

These are good tools. The common thread is that they're web platforms that need a connected account and upload your activity data to do the matching.

Track street coverage in MoveMap (iPhone, on-device)

MoveMap brings street coverage to a native iPhone app that reads from Apple Health and does the matching on your phone.

Step 1

Import from Apple Health

Open MoveMap and let it import your workouts from Apple Health.

Step 2

Open Coverage, then Streets

Open the Coverage area and choose Streets.

Step 3

See your covered streets

MoveMap detects your home city automatically from where you run most (or you can set it by hand if you run across several cities), then loads that city's street network and marks which streets you've covered.

How the matching works, briefly: MoveMap pulls the street map for your city from OpenStreetMap, samples each street into points a few metres apart, and checks those points against every GPS point in your history. A street counts as covered once you've run at least half of it (a point counts when it falls within roughly 15 metres of one of your routes). Requiring half the street, rather than a single point, avoids falsely crediting a road just because you crossed it at one intersection.

The result is a map of your city that fills in as you run: streets you've covered are coloured, the ones you haven't are still waiting, and a street you've only half-run shows half-filled. It's the same completionist view that draws people to CityStrides, in a native app that opens in a second. See how MoveMap compares to CityStrides.

Street coverage is a MoveMap Pro feature. The free tier shows your last twelve months on the map; Pro unlocks the full coverage dashboard.

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See how much of your city you've run.
MoveMap reads Apple Health locally. No account, no upload.
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What leaves your phone, and what doesn't

This is the honest part. Your workouts never leave your device - MoveMap has no account and no server to send them to. The one network request street coverage makes is to OpenStreetMap, to fetch the public map of streets for your city. That request sends only a bounding box for the area, never your routes, your coordinates, or any personal data. The matching between those streets and your runs happens entirely on the phone. You can read the full privacy policy.

How to actually complete a city

  • Work in a grid. Pick a chunk of the map and clear it block by block rather than running randomly and leaving gaps.
  • Bag the dead ends early. Cul-de-sacs and no-through-roads are the streets you'll otherwise have to make a special trip back for.
  • Plan loops, not laps. Stringing uncovered streets into one continuous loop covers more new ground per run.
  • Check the map after each run. Watching the uncovered streets disappear is the entire point, and it shows you where to aim next.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need a Strava or CityStrides account?

No. MoveMap reads your workouts from Apple Health. If your runs already flow into Apple Health from Strava, Garmin, Nike Run Club, or your Apple Watch, they're already there.

Does it work for walking and cycling?

Yes. Any GPS workout in Apple Health counts toward your covered streets, whether you ran, walked, or rode it.

Which city does it use?

MoveMap detects the city you run in most often automatically, and scopes the street network to that area so the map stays focused on where you actually run. If it guesses wrong, or you split your running across places, you can set the city yourself.

Why is a street I ran not marked as covered?

Coverage needs you to run at least half of a street (staying within roughly 15 metres of it). If you only ran one end, or only clipped it at an intersection, it stays uncovered until you run more - and it may show as partly filled in the meantime.