I have walked every street in Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames (again)

My claim back in May that  I have walked every street in Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames got a slight setback this week. Not that unexpected but unwelcome none the less.

The app I use to keep a record of everywhere I have walked, CityStrides, is based on OpenStreetMap which is maintained by a community of users, including myself (much as Wikipedia is) and it gets updated both with changes to the physical world, e.g. new streets, and by clarifications, e.g. marking streets with locked gates as private.

These changes get uploaded to CityStrides periodically and when these changes create unwalked roads (or parts of roads) the unwalked sections appear as red dots.

The latest update for Kingston upon Thames created a few red dots for me, as shown here.

Frustratingly none of these were new roads, just roads newly marked s walkable, and I would have walked them when in those areas had they been marked as walkable at that time. Still, things are what they are and so I set out to walk them all.

More frustratingly, some of the dots were at the very southern tip of the Borough (I live on the northern boundary) so it was a longish ride on two buses to get me to Malden Rushett. 

From there is was a pretty dreary walk up A243 all the way to the large junction with A3, an even drearier walk along both sides of A3 to the border with Surrey and back then further along A3 to Tolworth and just beyond. That accounted for three of the four groups of red dots.

Then I was lucky. I was expecting to continue along A3 to the final group when I learned that I could directly there on a 265 bus, so I did.

The final group was a little bit more of annoying A3 but the final two streets in my quest were in an exclusive private estate so I had lots of impressive houses to look at while tracking the final dots.

And that was it, I have now walked every street in Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames (again).