My pandemic walks project has involved a lot of densification: trying to exhaustively make use of all possible routes within a geographic area, acting as a kind of human radioactive tracer running through the city’s circulatory system.
This has been interesting and has led to some nice still and animated art.
At the same time, the whole project was motivated in part by the desire to avoid visiting and re-visiting the same areas during the pandemic. That, combined with pleasant spring weather, has me thinking about reorienting from densification toward extentification, both undertaking new rides to expand the total area explored and working to add days with over 100 km of riding.
I made some maps to get a sense of how long it would take to get beyond the explored region. I added lines to show the distances to places on the outermost edges of the explored area and, in parentheses, added the Google Maps bicycle travel times there from Brentwood Towers:
(Sorry the travel times are glitched in the final map; I wanted to make all the lines the same colour and accidentally overwrote the manual Google Maps travel times labels.)
These maps show only analog / mechanical / acoustic bicycle trips, including my year on Bike Share Toronto, my Dutch bike, and the loaner I used while it was being serviced.
I need to go a long way in most directions to get beyond the network: 10–15 km in most directions. The most direct route to new kilometres is northeast, through the Bridle Path and into the areas east of the northwestern branches of the Don.
The 10,000 milli-amp-hour portable phone battery which I bought for the 2015 CUPE 3902 TA strike at U of T had started bulging, so I replaced it. I should be set for day-long extentification weekend excursions now.
P.S. I figured out how to do this in a more automated way using QGIS. First, here is the area of all the rides converted into convex hulls:
And here is a set of automatically-generated spokes radiating in all directions from the centre point of all my rides (which is predictably enough right between home and work):
The only buggy element is how it projects spokes out into the lake. Nonetheless, this provides a useful visual guide to how far I need to go to get beyond my total area explored so far by bike.
