I’ve gotten very consistent with exercise but I’ve never liked doing it for its own sake. The healthiest I’ve ever been was walking/biking 7 miles to work for a year.

I’m thinking about doing something a little crazy: Walking every single street in the city of Philadelphia.

There are 2,215 miles of roads in Philadelphia, minus a few highways. So if I do a 4-5 mile walk 3 days a week for 3 years, I can easily walk every street. I plan to shoot one roll of film on each of the walks (that’s a lot of rolls of film but I can develop and scan myself).

The tricky part will be getting to the outskirts from Center City where I live. I can pretty easily bike to most of them, but later on I may take the train or bus.

I can use some of that walking time to call people I love on the phone, something I don’t do enough.

This isn’t the first time I’ve done something extreme involving walking. My dad decided to walk around all of the Finger Lakes and I walked two of them with him. One of them was Skaneateles Lake (the best lake ever). It was a 12 hour day of walking. We walked 44 miles.

When I tell people my plan, the first thing most of them say is “You don’t want to walk every street in Philadelphia!” It makes me sad. I’ve lived on a lot of streets. There are safe ways to go anywhere (as a man anyway). I wish people could feel less scared of their neighbors.

At first I looked for a real map, but I’m sad to say that it appears the map people who make attractive maps that include every street in Philadelphia and a nice solid outline of the city are all dead and gone. If you know who the Map People are today, please tell me.

Good news, though: There’s an app called StreetFerret that was made for precisely my purpose, walking (or running or biking) every street in a city, satisfyingly filling it all in, the whole map. It syncs with Strava data. I’d still like an analog map if you know of one.

It’s kind of a perfect little project for me:

  1. The best exercise for humans is walking.

  2. I get to see all of Philadelphia (the best city in America).

  3. Photography is great awareness practice for me.

  4. I can make calls.

  5. I can make something from it? Maybe? If it’s fun?