Playaz Club
Have you ever dreamed of visiting all of the locations mentioned in Rappin' 4-Tay's 1994 classic, Playaz Club? It sounds like a great idea for a road trip. Unfortunately, this type of proposal is often met with less enthusiasm than I expect. The conversations usually go something like this.
♫ music playing ♫
"Dude, let's visit every place listed in this song!!"
"Hmm, sounds fun, but there are just way too many Playaz Clubs."
"Maybe you're right..."
Disappointment hangs in the air
Well, I decided to see just how infeasible such a trip would be. Using the geocoding and distance service APIs from MapBox, I found driving times between all of the Playaz clubs. Feeding that information into the excellent Concorde solver for the Travelling Salesman Problem returned the shortest route visiting every venerable Playaz Club. If you don't have time for a road trip, you can just sit back and enjoy this virtual tour I constructed using more of MapBox's slick features.
Below is the complete itinerary, complete with travel times for each leg. I assume that you start at 4-Tay's preferred Playaz Club in the heart of the Fillmore District in San Francisco.
| Playaz Club | Driving Time |
|---|---|
| Fillmoe (Fillmore) | (start) |
| Army Street (now Cesar Chavez) | 17.8 min |
| H.P. (Hunters Point) | 11.9 min |
| Sunnydale | 11.0 min |
| Lakeview | 10.7 min |
| P.A. (Palo Alto) | 40.6 min |
| Bakersfield | 4.0 hr |
| L.A. | 1.8 hr |
| San Diego | 2.1 hr |
| Arizona | 8.5 hr |
| Texas | 16.4 hr |
| Atlanta | 15.0 hr |
| Philly (Philadelphia) | 11.8 hr |
| New York | 1.9 hr |
| Detroit | 9.2 hr |
| Chicago | 4.2 hr |
| Seattle | 29.0 hr |
| Sacramento | 11.7 hr |
| V-Town (Vallejo) | 1.3 hr |
| Richmond | 22.7 min |
| Biggity Biggity O (Oakland) | 21.8 min |
| P.H. (Potrero Hill) | 22.8 min |
| Total | 119.4 hr |
So there it is: in just under five days of driving, you could hit every spot listed in the song.
Authors and Contributors
Written by Peter Weir (@ptweir) in 2017.