Track Atlas

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Community-sourced running track map

Every running track mapped out.

Track Atlas exists to answer one question: where can I run near here?

For informational purposes only. Access to any track is up to whoever owns it. Check locally before you travel, and never enter private property.

Methodology

  1. Extract and filter

    One Overpass query per region returns every feature OpenStreetMap tags as a track. A custom algorithm filters on tags and polygon measurements, rejecting motorsport, equestrian and cycling variants and anything outside 85 to 450 meters in its longest dimension. Facilities mapped more than once are merged.

  2. Name from boundaries and registers

    Many tracks sit on school grounds. Containment against OpenStreetMap school polygons runs first, then a national school register, NCES in the United States, accepted only on a single school within 200 meters, then park containment.

  3. Name from Google Places

    Whatever is still unnamed goes to a paid search on a distance ladder: 50 meters for an athletic facility, 190 for a school, 210 for a park. Nothing further out is accepted. Google Cloud Natural Language confirms the candidate contains a proper noun, and shared campuses resolve to the secondary school. Where the evidence is thin the track keeps its town name.

  4. Sweep out bad names and tracks

    The park tier lets through water parks, skate parks and marinas, and OpenStreetMap's own name tag contributes its own errors. Another algorithm cleans these up, and most of its work is edge cases: it matches whole words and spares anything with a school in its name, so Marina High School is not deleted along with the marinas. It also expands initialisms, adds missing words like School, and drops names describing something that is not a track.

  5. Verify from imagery

    Two kinds of record reach this step: those still unnamed, and those flagged as possibly not tracks. Claude Opus 5 reviews USGS NAIP aerial imagery for each, confirming a closed loop of track proportions on the candidate's grounds. Among records with no school nearby, roughly 40% turn out to be airstrips, horse ovals, prison yards or walking loops.

  6. Geocode and publish

    Google Geocoding attaches a street address, one call per track, run last so nothing removed by the sweeps is paid for. The finished product is then rebuilt into the site and goes live, its tracks plotted over a Mapbox base map.

Aerial view of Hayward Field, a nine-lane running track in Eugene, Oregon
Hayward Field, Eugene, Oregon. USGS NAIP imagery, public domain.

Questions

How much does it cost to map a country?

It depends how many tracks the country has. A country of 1,000 tracks costs $14.26. The United States, at 18,808 tracks, came to $268.20.

The methodology above shows where each service is used. For a country of 1,000 tracks:

Service Calls Rate Cost
Google Geocodingevery track 1,000× $5.00 / 1k= $5.00
Google Placesthe 20% not named for free 200× $32.00 / 1k= $6.40
Google Natural Language1.5 checks per Places call 300× $1.00 / 1k= $0.30
Claude Opus 5the 16% needing imagery 160× $16.00 / 1k= $2.56
Total $14.26
Why do some tracks only show a town name?

Because a wrong name is worse than no name. About one track in 21 keeps its town name plus the word Track, like Barnesville Track.

That happens when every stage comes up short. No school or park boundary contains the track, Google Places finds only unrelated buildings nearby, and Claude's review of the aerial imagery cannot tie it to any candidate. With nothing reliable to go on, the town name stays.

Why are only the United States and the United Kingdom mapped?

They have two of the largest running populations in the world, so the map began there. Covering every country is the goal, but each one carries a cost to add, and further coverage depends on sponsorship.

Something is wrong. Can I report it?

Yes. Every track on the map has a button to report a problem or suggest a better name. Aerial photography is not current everywhere, so a track may have been resurfaced, fenced off or built over since the picture was taken.