Here’s What You Discover When You Walk Every Block in New York City

This is Street Wars, a weekly series on the battle for space on New York’s streets and sidewalks.

At around 4 a.m. on a recent Saturday, a 37-year-old software engineer named Greg Miller left his apartment in Astoria, Queens, and headed to Borough Park, Brooklyn, to get an early start on the week’s 20-mile walk.

As the sun climbed in the sky, it was largely quiet. Birds could be heard chirping, and so could the shh of tree leaves swaying in the breeze. Occasionally the beeps from a garbage truck pierced the silence, as did the rumble of a subway train passing overhead.

Many New Yorkers find the simple act of being a pedestrian in the city a challenge. So much noise. So much traffic. The sidewalks themselves can be an obstacle course, jammed with dining sheds and e-bike riders, people walking six dogs at once, people paying more attention to their phones than to the people around them.

And then there’s Miller, who walks not simply to get where he’s going, not simply for the fresh air, but to meet a wildly ambitious goal: to walk all the streets in every borough. All 8,000 miles of them.

And while he’s at it, he’s able to experience the city differently from the rest of us.

“It’s almost like being a tourist over and over again,” Miller said. “But you’re not going to the tourist traps, you’re going to some, you know, really quaint streets in the middle of the borough.”