JervExplore every street in Amsterdam
A dense, walkable, almost entirely flat city where a single afternoon opens a startling amount of map — and where the canals decide your route whether you like it or not.
Amsterdam is close to the ideal city for this. It is flat, it is dense, it is small enough to be genuinely finishable, and it was built for people moving at walking and cycling speed. If you are starting a fog of war map somewhere, starting it here is cheating.
The shape of the problem
The centre is a set of concentric canal rings crossed by radial streets, wrapped around the older medieval core. That geometry has two consequences for anyone trying to cover it.
The first is good: the streets are short, they connect constantly, and there are very few dead ends. A loop through the Grachtengordel opens a lot of ground for the distance, because you are never repeating yourself for long.
The second is the catch: the canals control where you can cross. Two streets can run parallel forty metres apart and share no connection for several hundred metres. Covering both sides of a canal is not one route, it is two, and the bridges decide how they join. Plan for that and the city opens quickly. Ignore it and you will find yourself with a map full of long parallel stripes and unfilled gaps between them.
Where to start
Start where the density is highest, because that is where each kilometre buys the most map.
- The Jordaan. Narrow, gridded, and full of short streets. An hour on foot here changes the picture more than an hour almost anywhere else in the country.
- The canal ring. Do it as an out-and-back on opposite banks rather than a loop, so the bridges work for you.
- De Pijp. A tight grid south of the centre, and fast to cover systematically.
- The Eastern Docklands. Newer, more open, and full of bridges and pedestrian links that do not appear on a driving map.
Then let it spread outward: Oud-West, Oost, Noord across the free ferry, and the ring of post-war districts beyond the A10.
What actually takes the time
Not distance. Amsterdam's problem is not that it is big.
Repetition. The city funnels you along the same handful of routes — over the same bridges, through the same squares — and after a fortnight most of your trips will be reopening ground you already have. The cure is to stop planning routes and start planning gaps: look at the map, find a hole, and go and stand in it.
The courtyards and hofjes. Amsterdam is full of semi-public interior spaces, passages between streets, and cut-throughs that no route planner will ever suggest. These are where the unclaimed squares live, and they are the reason to walk rather than ride.
Noord. Everything across the IJ feels like a separate project because the ferries constrain when and where you cross. Treat it as its own city and it is much less daunting.
Cycling or walking?
Both, and they cover different things.
By bike you will take the arterials, the canal-side roads and the fietspaden, and you will cover ground fast. On foot you will get the alleys, the passages, the pedestrianised squares and the interiors — which is where the ground nobody has covered actually is.
A reasonable pattern is to ride the frontier outward and then walk it properly. The bike decides where you are exploring; the feet decide how completely.
A note on the squares
Jerv works in squares of about fifty metres a side at this latitude. In central Amsterdam that is roughly a canal's width plus its houses — so walking one bank opens that bank, and the far side stays dark until you cross. That is the intended behaviour and it is why the city reads so well on a fog map: the water is visible in the shape of what you have opened.
Ready? Get the iPhone beta — free, through TestFlight — or open the web app in any browser. Either way your map starts blacked out.