my body is a roadmap of, uh, roads

June 26, 2023 10:50 AM

Do you know your town like the back of your hand? Then prove it, with, uh, Back Of Your Hand, a web game that asks you to identify randomly selected streets on a map and scores you on how close you got.

Notes:
- it does some IP-based geoguessing about browser location but you can click to assign the circle anywhere
- broadly global support seems to be there—I spot checked cities/towns on several continents without it outright breaking—but I can't speak to how well it handles metadata from different areas
- you can adjust circle radius and difficulty in settings; the default hardest setting has been absolutely stomping my ass with weird little Portland side streets I feel justified in not knowing existed, YMMV

posted by cortex (46 comments total)

76% success rate for me in re: to my small Canadian city! Anything outside of a 5 km radius around me is very Here There Be Monsters.
posted by Kitteh at 10:59 AM on June 26, 2023 [2 favorites]

Wow, moved the location back to my original home town and found out that one of the subdivisions has "old lady" names for all the streets. Wilma, Zelda, Olga, Norma. The fifth street was Walter St, which was on the other side of town.

No offense to Metafilter's own Wilma, Zelda, Olga and Norma.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 11:04 AM on June 26, 2023 [2 favorites]

Well, playing a little circle of San Francisco (on easy mode) was fun, but two of the three times I played it came up with 13th Street, which is kind of hard to click because it's right under the freeway on ramp, but more annoyingly it dinged me for Octavia because it asked for Octavia BOULEVARD. Who knew Octavia changes from Street to Boulevard closer to Market?

Anyway - fun! A delightful little diversion for a Monday morning. Thanks for posting this, cortex!
posted by kristi at 11:20 AM on June 26, 2023

94%. Small town boy. Doesn't make it any harder if 70% of the land is under water.
posted by biffa at 11:24 AM on June 26, 2023 [1 favorite]

Oh boy, this is right up my alley!

A little chuffed and unlucky though at my results because the numbered streets in Cleveland run north/south , parallel to each other but they are not connected; so you select east 55th street but the segment they are seeking is a mile north from the segment of east 55th that you selected.

Still a blast and thanks for sharing!
posted by fizzix at 11:36 AM on June 26, 2023 [1 favorite]

100% on "Resident" difficult within a 2 km circle.

I got cocky and moved to "Taxi Driver" and upped the radius to 3 km. I got one out of five (which it scored higher than 20%, for some reason.)
posted by mark k at 11:37 AM on June 26, 2023

I haven't tried the game yet but A+++ post title; an absolute banger
posted by phooky at 11:38 AM on June 26, 2023

Guh, a couple weeks ago I had a medical appointment on University Row.

I know University Avenue, University Bay Drive, College Drive... but where University Row was I had no idea whatever. I think I would be very bad at this game.
posted by humbug at 11:44 AM on June 26, 2023 [1 favorite]

I got the roads you actually drive on or have notable things there, but random subdivision neighborhood roads on the outskirts of the radius are all a mystery to me. The map is also upside down compared to my mental compass is pointing "up" which is actually more of a SW direction.
posted by GoblinHoney at 11:56 AM on June 26, 2023 [1 favorite]

I couldn't get higher than 40% for anywhere I've lived in the last 7 years, but then I realized the default setting I got was "taxi driver," and I got up to 50-55%-ish by switching to "resident." (Highest score: where I used to live in Brooklyn, at the corner of 60th street and 18th avenue, an area I knew pretty well because if the bus was late I just walked home, but I mostly scored high because so many of the streets are in numerical order.)
posted by Jeanne at 12:39 PM on June 26, 2023

I was a little worried at the beginning as the first question I had no idea about (it is an industrial area cul-de-sac which I have never even been near) but the rest I was familiar with as a pedestrian - 80%.
posted by Ashwagandha at 12:46 PM on June 26, 2023

This breaks pretty hilariously around Boston, given that roughly half of all streets here are named Washington Street. It seems to score you based on closest distance to any street by the same name, so the get percentage starts to go up with more common street names.

There is also the problem of a mile long street having four different names as it passes through different towns, but that's more an issue of me not having a very clear sense of where some of the city borders are.
posted by backseatpilot at 12:50 PM on June 26, 2023 [3 favorites]

This would have been fun except for the fact that 2 of the 5 "streets" that it gave me were driveways in the giant cemetery a few blocks north of me, which ... I didn't even know those had names that would be on a map.
posted by jferg at 1:09 PM on June 26, 2023 [3 favorites]

100% on "Resident" difficult within a 2 km circle

Same. I actually used to be a pizza delivery driver in this area, so I could probably manage a lot higher degree of difficulty.
posted by LionIndex at 1:23 PM on June 26, 2023 [1 favorite]

Using my old neighborhood in Minneapolis, I had an experience similar to kristi's, wherein at some point "University Ave. SE" apparently turns into "SE University Ave.", which I did not know despite living near there for 50+ years and travelling on it constantly, but bzzzzzt there went half my points. Bah, I say. (Fun game, though.)
posted by Kat Allison at 2:02 PM on June 26, 2023 [1 favorite]

This is pretty fun, but my neighborhood radius includes Green-Wood Cemetery, where all the fancifully named paths and walkways apparently made it into the street database! Narcissus Path, Corvus Avenue, Fern Path...
posted by moonmilk at 2:24 PM on June 26, 2023 [3 favorites]

We’ve lived here nine years and there are streets within a couple blocks of my house that I can’t name, so I suspect this is not the game for me.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 3:20 PM on June 26, 2023 [1 favorite]

I can’t be the only one who could draw you a relatively comprehensive map of every neighbourhood I’ve ever lived in, but could barely name any of the streets. Who’s got the bandwidth for all those pesky numbers and words

ETA: which I mention only because the OP asks “Do you know your town like the back of your hand?” Which I do. Unless you ask me whether the dairy queen is on Regent street, because it’s not. It’s across from the seven eleven, in that strip mall with the little dirt path in the back that borders that spooky overgrown house.
posted by TangoCharlie at 3:29 PM on June 26, 2023 [11 favorites]

Yeah, it also gave me a bunch of inch long 'streets'/driveways in or or adjacent to cemeteries and parks. Nothing anyone ever drives on unless they are driving a hearse.
posted by Whale Oil at 3:32 PM on June 26, 2023 [1 favorite]

In my town it seems to like testing me on a lot of the MTBike trails! I do better with those than some of the streets a couple blocks from me!
posted by snoboy at 3:36 PM on June 26, 2023

Maps, street names, these things I can handle. Just don't ask me to pick the actual back of my hand out of a lineup.
posted by aws17576 at 3:47 PM on June 26, 2023 [2 favorites]

I had a very lucky 96%. Streets it asked for:
The 50m cul-de-sac where I am right now.
The 100m dirt track leading to an unnamed farm road that everyone inexplicably knows.
The tiny road when I used to drop off shopping to an elderly gentleman during the pandemic.
The road at the edge of the village where the residents insist they're actually in an entirely different village, a claim from which no aerial photo could ever dissuade them.
A hill where one old chap used to garden in the nude, and a lady further up fell into a wheelie bin, both of whom I encountered in contexts I can't remember.
posted by pipeski at 4:11 PM on June 26, 2023 [7 favorites]

I got 99% in Reykjavík, but there were some issues. For some reason one of the five wasn’t a street but the name of a specific house. I outthought myself by guessing it was for some reason that was the OpenStreetMap name for the nameless path that goes past that house, but it wasn’t, it was just asking for the house.

I’ll say that I feel a bit like I’m cheating because for most of my life I’ve been a pedestrian first and foremost, so have traipsed around that part of the world for forty plus years, give or take longer or shorter stints spent living abroad. I’ll have to try again with Providence, where I lived for five years, and my neighborhood in Helsinki, and see how I do.
posted by Kattullus at 4:32 PM on June 26, 2023 [3 favorites]

Just don't ask me to pick the actual back of my hand out of a lineup.

There was recently a task on Taskmaster (a tv show) where contestants were asked to find a photo of the back of their own hand (maybe yt link here)
It was pretty difficult!
posted by Acari at 4:50 PM on June 26, 2023 [5 favorites]

I was just coming to bring up Taskmaster. Finding a picture of your own hand in the midst of eight hundred other pictures of hands is challenging indeed, it seems.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 4:53 PM on June 26, 2023

I could do it, I got this one real weird long hair, is that TMI
posted by taquito sunrise at 4:57 PM on June 26, 2023 [1 favorite]

Of the five contestants, the one who had the easiest time of it suspected something when she was asked to put her hand on the table for a picture and so curled her fingers. Much easier to spot in a sea of flat hands.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 6:29 PM on June 26, 2023

There was recently a task on Taskmaster (a tv show) where contestants were asked to find a photo of the back of their own hand

That may seem pretty difficult, but I found the back of my hand in this video
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 9:12 PM on June 26, 2023

I'm going to need a special version of this for my city. All the streets are numbered here, north-south streets are even and east-west streets are odd, which theoretically makes this trivial.

However, the numbering is restarted in the northeast corner of every neighborhood. This means there's something like twenty different streets named "25th street" in the city.

So I need a multiclick version where the question isn't "Can you find this street?" but rather "How many of this street can you find?"
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 10:42 PM on June 26, 2023 [1 favorite]

By default, it came up with the inner city of Copenhagen, where I don't live anymore, but where I was once a delivery girl. I came up with 66%, and only one accurate guess. I was pretty shocked, but also fascinated by how my brain has apparently erased information I no longer use. I should go to work now (from home), but will try with my actual neighborhood later.

Fun game!
posted by mumimor at 12:02 AM on June 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

Yeah the surburban street names throw a wrench in the works.

The thing about knowing your neighborhood like the back of your hand is not knowing the names of all the local streets. It’s knowing your way around by feel, from deep down in your bones. Ask a local how to navigate somewhere, and you get that cliche, “go left at the 7 Eleven that used to be Nate’s bike shop.”

I’d like to try a version of this that uses street view, drops you somewhere in the area, and asks you to find your way home.
posted by notyou at 4:48 AM on June 27, 2023 [5 favorites]

notyou, I would play that SO HARD.
posted by Night_owl at 5:16 AM on June 27, 2023

That would be great, notyou.

I've realized that part of my problem with doing well at this is that I love and respect Portland's 100-per-block addressing system and rely on it constantly for navigating on the fly, and that is of no use for finding a street in this game since I don't get any of that context.

Tell me I need to get blindly to N Shart Ave, I'm gonna be doomed. Nobody except the mail carriers and the people who live on Shart know where that is. Tell me I need to get to 6734 N Shart and Shart's a few blocks west of good ol' Fenton Ave, I can get there on the first try without followup questions. Because Portland runs avenues north-south and numbers them out a hundred at a time: N means we're west of the east/west divider, 6700 blocks are 67 blocks north of the north/south divider, everybody knows Fenton as a major named Ave so use that as a starting point and watch street signs driving west from there on a street near the the 6700s mark till you see, turn, watch house number on the correct side of the street for even numbers.

It's even easier in other parts of the city where the avenues are numbered. It's mostly a grid. (Well, technically a couple of grids, but one took almost the whole cake in the end.) I grew up thinking this was just how city addressing works; I got absolutely lost in random Boston-area townships when I visited, and find the Japanese style of addressing totally wild as well.
posted by cortex at 7:07 AM on June 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

Tell Me No Lies: However, the numbering is restarted in the northeast corner of every neighborhood. This means there's something like twenty different streets named "25th street" in the city.

Oh, that’s fascinating. So do people give directions like so?

I live in the Harbor District, 21st Street, house number 16

posted by Kattullus at 7:33 AM on June 27, 2023

Even as a native New Yorker who walks everywhere here, I couldn't crack 50% on taxi driver mode!
posted by AJaffe at 8:58 AM on June 27, 2023

Here in Fargo, we have an organized grid of streets with numbers, streets going one direction, avenues going the other, and I too delivered pizza, so I only got a few wrong within a block or two. I didn't move the pin out to the suburbs because not only did those not exist while I delivered pizza, the organization stops having any rhyme or reason beyond the long straight major streets that line up with the ordered grid.

My wife doesn't like the ordered grid, because she grew up in Milwaukee where it has the method of organization of "tree names are over there" and "president names are over there" and "flower names are kind of that way" but I don't know how you'd possibly get a winning score in this game there.
posted by AzraelBrown at 9:10 AM on June 27, 2023

I missed one because it's on Coast Guard Island, which you can only go on if you're in the Coast Guard, which I am not.
posted by kirkaracha at 9:39 AM on June 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

"Waterloo Road cycle path", a 15m section of cycle path on a half-mile road? Noped out at that point.
posted by Hogshead at 10:17 AM on June 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

I live in the Harbor District, 21st Street, house number 16

Basically, although with the general confusion it's also polite to give cross streets. For example the full address of a local library is:

Calle 53 #524 x 66 y 68
Centro, Mérida, Yucatán,
México 97000

So,

53rd Street, house number 524, between 66th and 68th street
in the "Centro" district of Mérida, Yucatán

Here's one in the field minus the district.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 10:45 AM on June 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

Oh wow, that’s certainly something else. I found a map of Mérida, and it’s a lot more complicated than I was envisioning. I’m glad it’s been left that way and nobody’s tried to standardize it.
posted by Kattullus at 11:28 AM on June 27, 2023

Has anyone remotely managed to succeed at this game with a UK location? I keep opening it and going ‘welp’ and closing it again.
posted by lokta at 11:39 AM on June 27, 2023

Core Vancouver BC isn't that challenging, with its numbered EW avenues and themed named streets running NS through the city (themes roughly are named after famous British battles ("Balaclava"), trees ("Yew"), Canadian provinces (not in geo order), Scottish people ("Dumfries"), and then BC towns. So it's not challenging at all, but once in a while it would a number at me like "20" that wasn't the avenue, but something under the Oak St. bridge. Nowhere near 20th Avenue nor a 2000 block.

Any other folks here check this out and find the same thing?
posted by morspin at 12:03 PM on June 27, 2023

Has anyone remotely managed to succeed at this game with a UK location?

As I mentioned above, 96%. It really depends on where you live. I'm in a village about a mile across, and I've been living and working here for 20 years. I still probably only know 70% of the road names though.
posted by pipeski at 1:08 PM on June 27, 2023

Harder than I expected on “taxi driver” mode; seems like they use a lot of very minor routes (in some cases walking trails instead of streets) that no one knows the name of or have a different local name than the Google Maps name. I also wonder if there are copyright traps on Google Maps that further complicate things.
posted by TedW at 1:36 PM on June 27, 2023

Has anyone remotely managed to succeed at this game with a UK location?

I didn't do too terribly once I set it to Resident. Taxi driver was awful. Areas where the road names are somewhat themed ought to be easier (eg we have the flower roads and the artist roads around here, and I used to live somewhere where the names were x road, x street, x crescent, x way and so on, where x = the same place name).
posted by paduasoy at 2:02 PM on June 27, 2023

But I’ve been driving around Austin so long I’ve completely disregarded street names, and I just drive to where I’m going. I doubt I’d do very well at this. People occasionally ask me where something is located, and I don’t know how to tell them because my internal navigation system exists beyond words in this place.
posted by Devils Rancher at 5:16 PM on June 27, 2023 [1 favorite]