How well do you know your own neighborhood?

April 16, 2022 6:56 AM

Like the Back of Your Hand? (Requires location services to be turned on.)
posted by dobbs (44 comments total)

Oooo hard!!!
posted by tiny frying pan at 7:24 AM on April 16, 2022

This is probably more challenging if you don't live on a grid system
posted by rouftop at 7:24 AM on April 16, 2022 [2 favorites]

turns out i don't know all the pretentious bullshit cul-de-sac street names in the rich-people enclaves around town
posted by glonous keming at 7:26 AM on April 16, 2022 [21 favorites]

I live on a grid system but just moved to a new neighborhood in Chicago and this is a fun way to test my new knowledge of my surroundings, for sure.
posted by tiny frying pan at 7:33 AM on April 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

I thought I would do ok but apparently I’m lucky just to find my way home every day...
posted by one4themoment at 7:38 AM on April 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

I thought central Manhattan would be 100% easy, but I missed Central Park Driveway. (Tokyo is too hard because we don't have many street names, so it's all names of tiny bridges.)
posted by Umami Dearest at 7:45 AM on April 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

Turns out I know shit about my area. :(
posted by greenhornet at 7:52 AM on April 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

All the alleys in Baltimore have names! I was a solid 50% with my neighborhood which I amble along all the time.
posted by Lucubrator at 8:12 AM on April 16, 2022 [2 favorites]

I like the concept. The execution, as I think one would expect, is very beta.

Like glonous keming, the first time I tried it a couple of days ago all the ones I missed were random 1/2 mile streets in "rich [white] people enclaves". I got a 40%

Trying again after seeing this post, I got 85% and to rouftop's comment it was largely much easier since this time it chose everything in grid versus out of grid.

Oddly enough, it took more time to play the second time than the first because:

a. our grid system is enclosed in a loop
b. the loop and all major roads have more than one name
and, most importantly
c. our little old town has a lot of breaks in roads for libraries, parks, bike paths, creeks, etc.

and that was all "xx st n" or "xx ave s"

To get back to the "beta-ness" of it, it was really hard to place pins correctly, which is part of my score "only" being an 85% the second time came in. But, roads having more than one name ("b", above), was a much bigger factor. I've not seen an answer to that without boots on the ground experience.

For example: what would one call I-290 in near Chicago? It's been about 15 years since I've been back to where I grew up, but I always called it the Ike, knew older people who called it Congress Expressway, younger people who did call it 290, and now since I've not been there in ages, I have no clue what people call it today.

Google Field Trip (and eventually Ingress, PokemanGo, etc.) was really great about this... start with extracting the data, correlate with known historical sites, etc. and "gamify" it for the "players" to fill in better data.

(gamify and players in quotes, because Field Trip was not a game, but obviously Ingress and Pokemon Go are. Regardless, boots on the ground make it better.)
posted by a non mouse, a cow herd at 8:14 AM on April 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

I thought I would nail this because I have been a bike delivery person, but I know nothing of the streets outside my area.
That said, it was easy to improve scores, because there weren't a lot of problems in the game. So after three rounds, I was at 100% This game has potential, but it isn't there yet.
posted by mumimor at 8:20 AM on April 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

Sigh, 29 percent. Apparently I get lost in my own backyard.
posted by champers at 8:23 AM on April 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

Yeah so I 1) can’t read a map, 2) don’t drive, and 3) never leave the house unless I can help it.

The only reason I got 18% was because I assumed the library is on the street by the same name, and I know that the library is right above the park, so guessed one of the streets up there and happened to be nearly correct.

I probably could have gotten some of the numbered streets by going over to the single numbered street I know the location of (where the in-laws live) and counting over from there, but the map wouldn’t let me scroll that far.
posted by brook horse at 8:56 AM on April 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

I wonder what the null distribution is! I'm doing this while visiting a non-grid city where I don't speak the language of the streetnames or even recognise them, and I got 32% and 29% on two rounds of wild guessing....
posted by Westringia F. at 8:57 AM on April 16, 2022

My run had some issues with it treating sections of streets as not being part of the street it wanted. Apparently the west Broadway St doesn't start until the 200 block according to them.
posted by Ferreous at 8:57 AM on April 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

This is probably more challenging if you don't live on a grid system

Yes and no: in one part of my hometown only every tenth street gets a name; the rest are all just numbers (East 18th, East 19th, Upper Wentworth, East 21st, etc.). It’s tricky when you can only see an unlabelled map and have to guess at which street is where based on, sat, where a park is; on the other hand, when one of your tasks is to locate East 33rd (I miscounted and picked East 23rd) and your subsequent assignment is East 32nd, it’s not hard.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 9:21 AM on April 16, 2022

I live in a part of Queens where there's a mix of semi-grid streets and streets that follow the cowpaths. Even for the grid parts of Queens, the numbering system is absolutely bonkers... things like 90th Street, 90th Road, 90th Place, 90th Avenue, a named street, then 91st Street, 91st Crescent...

So yeah, even living where I've lived for a decade, this is insanely difficult.
posted by SansPoint at 9:26 AM on April 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

I lived in Centretown in Ottawa for most of a decade. Seemingly the entire core bears the names of what I presume to be elaborately bewhiskered 19th-century Scotsmen. After years there, if you asked me directions from the corner of Gilmour and MacDonald to MacLaren and Metcalfe, I could not picture either intersection, give directions, or even tell you which general direction the trip is.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 9:33 AM on April 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

I love this, and got some good scores, but the radius this thing considers "my neighborhood" is like 1/4 the area of San Francisco. Now, I am confident that I know my neighborhood (Haight-Ashbury) like the back of my hand. But Laurel Heights? No. That's really not my neighborhood.
It would be awesome if this game gave us some pre-drawn (sure to inspire argument) neighborhood boundaries, or allowed us to draw our own neighborhood boundaries in which to be tested. Neighborhoods are not circles of arbitrary diameter.
posted by niicholas at 10:22 AM on April 16, 2022 [3 favorites]

Whelp I guess it says "How well do you know your area" but I'm obsessed with neighborhood boundaries so that's what I brought to it.
posted by niicholas at 10:26 AM on April 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

I don't know the back of my hand like the back of my hand. (Pretty familiar with one or two scars on an index finger, though.)
posted by BWA at 10:30 AM on April 16, 2022

Like niicholas, I found the game fun but odd.

I was being tested not on my (Baltimore-ish) town, which has parameters and a personality, but on random service roads for industrial parks on the fringes of the city.
posted by champers at 10:47 AM on April 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

turns out i don't know all the pretentious bullshit cul-de-sac street names in the rich-people enclaves around town

Yeah, lost interest real quick once I realized that was all this quiz was about.
posted by Rash at 10:49 AM on April 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

I would do much better at this game if instead of street names it asked me to identify the house with the mimosa tree or the street with the Bassett hound that lives next to a corgi.
posted by pangolin party at 11:42 AM on April 16, 2022 [8 favorites]

Tried this on "Lisbon Level" and despite having lived here for nigh on 30 years, wasn't anywhere near 25%... lots of fun tho'
posted by chavenet at 1:09 PM on April 16, 2022

This was a big area, it really spanned at least four distinct neighborhoods.

I wish they'd given more points for being not-very-close but having a very general idea of where things were. Probably more appropriate in a city like mine that is a) not on a grid and b) has a ton of streets that are only 5-10 blocks long.
posted by geegollygosh at 1:41 PM on April 16, 2022

For the NW region of San Francisco, it asked for really small and obscure streets, including one called simply “8”. I assume I am a victim of a hateful AI.
posted by njohnson23 at 2:04 PM on April 16, 2022

How close to your neighborhood is the map showing? It's giving me an area about three quarters of a mile away and not at all an area I would consider my neighborhood. But I love the concept.
posted by etaoin at 2:12 PM on April 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

etalon, since it doesn’t give me the “allow location services” prompt on iOS, like for instance Wikipedia “nearby,” I assume it’s inferring location from IP addresses. My location is about a half mile from where I actually am as well, and notably in the direction the microwave dish is pointing (Monkeybrains line-of-sight Internet link).

It would be disturbing if it were using GPS without prompting but I’m pretty sure it’s not.
posted by sjswitzer at 2:24 PM on April 16, 2022

since it doesn’t give me the “allow location services” prompt on iOS

It asked me for location service on MacOS and when I click accept my location is dead-center to the circle. If you view the url after you click accept, your lat and long are in the url.

Also, if you can double click to change the center before a game starts so if you're accidentally tapping the screen before you begin, you might be altering its starting point.
posted by dobbs at 2:34 PM on April 16, 2022

instead of being at the center of the circle, my apt building is right on the edge

they get to test me on my neighborhood knowledge as soon as they figure out where my neighborhood is
posted by pyramid termite at 4:23 PM on April 16, 2022

Anyway, to the game. First round I killed it because it asked for two relatively obscure streets I just happened to know and a few that are pretty well-known. But as it turns out there are a lot of one- and two-block streets around here and I’ve struck out more times than I want to admit.

I happen to live on a tiny one-block street and am always impressed when taxi drivers (returning from the airport, generally) just know it. They don’t need no stinkin’ GPS.
posted by sjswitzer at 5:08 PM on April 16, 2022

I gave up a few question in. I live in Pittsburgh which means that I'm lucky to know how to get my way back home without accidentally finding my way on the wrong side of the river. Also half the streets are actually alley ways that no one remembers the names of.
posted by octothorpe at 6:16 PM on April 16, 2022

I can say pretty confidently that even reading these comments I am sure this will be a waste of my time. I've lived in my place for 7 years and I still don't know hardly any of the street names in my neighborhood. They are numeric and only sometimes sequential, and remembering them is basically impossible for my brain to do.
posted by potrzebie at 6:34 PM on April 16, 2022

Once you've played it once you can move the dot anywhere on the map, which made it fun- I know my parent's neighbourhood better than mine! (Probably because of dog walking.)
posted by freethefeet at 7:35 PM on April 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

I moved here 2 years ago, after spending 1 in Surrey. Before that, I was in Kits for 12 years (Kerrisdale for a bunch, and UBC for lots).

I could ace the test for Kits, Kerrisdale, and UBC but I was also car-less and of an age to have the time and inclination to explore the neighborhood and surrounds on foot/ bike.
posted by porpoise at 10:18 PM on April 16, 2022

It covered the entirety of our 5 sq mile streetcar suburb, plus the stripmall edges. I know the main neighborhoods pretty well from running, but there are a number of recent infill developments that fit the category "pretentious bullshit cul-de-sac street names in the rich-people enclaves around town".

Also, many, but not all, of our streets have directions within their names, and that proved problematic. Apparently, there is a single block of the major street S Columbia Dr. (there is no N. Columbia Dr.) that is just called Columbia Dr, and I did not click near enough to that specific directionless block.
posted by hydropsyche at 5:39 AM on April 17, 2022

I am visiting my mom in a home she moved into this week, and all I have done is help her unpack. Plus, the selected area is slightly off centre and skewed to the rich people residential above us and not the main roads and retail below us. So, that went poorly.
posted by jacquilynne at 5:44 AM on April 17, 2022

My neighbourhood, with a little grid and otherwise a series of 1-5 block streets off of a few arterials, was fully built out by the 80's and hasn't really changed much since i was doing in house service work 20 years ago so getting 100% was pretty easy.

However it did require mentally driving along from major intersections counting off the streets until i got to the target: "Elm, Maple, Aspen, Oak, Courtney, Alberni, Evans, ah, here we are, Surrey."
posted by Mitheral at 8:14 AM on April 17, 2022

Okay, first try and it asked me to name a street in another country. Come on.

I live in Detroit, so South Detroit Windsor, Canada falls within the very generous radius that this game drew for me.
posted by EmperorOozy at 9:21 AM on April 17, 2022 [2 favorites]

I'm in Harlem. I got a 95%, as it's just a matter of counting north from 110 (north end of Central Park) or south from 125 (major thoroughfare). I lost a few points for being a block off Tiemann, it's been a while since I was there. If it started asking avenues, I'd be in trouble, I always misplace St Nicholas Ave in my head.
posted by Hactar at 5:20 PM on April 17, 2022

I can do most of my neighborhood really well, but I missed one early because they drew in all the alleys. No one draws the alleys in St Paul. They don't have names, so WTF?
posted by Cris E at 9:00 PM on April 17, 2022 [1 favorite]

This is probably more challenging if you don't live on a grid system

I'm on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, so this was nearly a cakewalk - okay, sure, I needed to know a named avenue in Harlem, and I was off by one, but that was on me. But then they asked me to locate a street across the river someplace in I dunno, Woodcliff, and HOW DARE YOU
posted by Mchelly at 7:16 AM on April 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

83%! Didn't know where Foch Road (heh!) was.
posted by the cydonian at 2:43 AM on April 19, 2022

This is probably more challenging if you don't live on a grid system

My city loves grid systems so much that we have hundreds of them, all at different alignments and scales. Each neighborhood used to be its own municipality and apparently weren't going to coordinate with the next tiny village three blocks away.
posted by octothorpe at 5:00 AM on April 19, 2022 [1 favorite]