I want to ride my bicycle (through every Sydney suburb)
A simple goal that got out of hand: ride through every single Sydney suburb, and map every ride. 644 of 660 done.
What hooked me
It started in early 2021 as a simple idea: ride a bike through every suburb in Sydney. Simple ideas are the dangerous ones. Within a couple of weeks I had GPX files, suburb boundary polygons and a web page coloured in with every suburb I'd crossed.
What I built
A completion map. Every ride's GPS track sits over the suburb boundaries. Each suburb records the ride that first touched it, a Wikipedia summary appears when you click it, and running totals keep score.
The first version in 2021 was jQuery and Bootstrap, and it was "90% working" for a very long time. In September 2026 I rebuilt it as a Vite and React dashboard over Leaflet. It now also has tours: Europe in 2023 (Belgium, France and the Netherlands), then Japan in 2024 and again in 2025. Those rides come straight from Strava.
Where it's at
- 660 suburbs on the map
- 644 ridden
- 16 to go
Sixteen suburbs. That's the kind of number that sounds finishable, which is exactly why it isn't finished.
What I learned
Figuring out "have I been here?" is just a point-in-polygon test run a few million times. Also, not every place you think of as a suburb is an official one. Gore Hill, for example, has no polygon to colour in, which is still a bit upsetting.