# Route builder can't "escape" a completed city
**URL:** https://community.citystrides.com/t/route-builder-cant-escape-a-completed-city/30148
**Category:** Support
**Created:** [September 21, 2026, 1:29pm UTC](https://community.citystrides.com/t/route-builder-cant-escape-a-completed-city/30148 "2026-09-21T13:29:16Z")
**Posts on this page:** 3
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@tev4](https://community.citystrides.com/u/tev4)
#### Post date: [September 21, 2026, 1:29pm UTC](https://community.citystrides.com/t/route-builder-cant-escape-a-completed-city/30148/1 "2026-09-21T13:29:17Z")
### CityStrides Profile Link
> **[MechanicalTim - CityStrides](https://citystrides.com/users/4546)**
>
> The best tool to help you Run Every Street
### Message
It seems that if the starting point in Route Builder is within the boundaries of a completed city, then one is doomed to get the message “You have no incomplete streets near that point in ”. I’ve attached a screenshot that illustrates a case where the starting point is in Medford (which I’ve completed) and the ending point is in the neighboring city of Malden.
My main use case where this is a bit frustrating is when I’d like to know if I can get to any new streets with an N-mile run that starts and finishes at my home.
I can get what I need with some pretty simple work-arounds, so this is not high-priority for me, but I’m guessing this is not intended behavior, so I thought I’d report it.
---
### Author:  [@JamesChevalier](https://community.citystrides.com/u/JamesChevalier)
#### Post date: [September 21, 2026, 8:03pm UTC](https://community.citystrides.com/t/route-builder-cant-escape-a-completed-city/30148/2 "2026-09-21T20:03:16Z")
It actually is the (short-sighted) intended behavior.
There are _a lot_ of streets, so I need to limit the ‘blast radius’ of the queries for this thing. If I let it loose on the full table, we’d be waiting for several minutes for any generated routes to be shown to us. The simplest way to accomplish that is to grab the city based on the lat/lon of wherever you clicked, and limit the work to streets in that city.
In addition to that, there’s the perspective of Route Builder being used towards the goal of completing every street in a city. If you _did_ have incomplete streets in the city where you dropped the start point, but the system sent you out to complete a bunch in the neighboring city, you might be a little irked that it’s not focusing on the city you’re trying to complete now.
I’ll need to think of some ways it can continue trying to build a route for these scenarios…
- Including the end point’s city can help some cases (like yours) … but that wouldn’t fix the case where someone is starting/ending near the city border & is cool with traveling into the neighboring city (like if your end point was at the start as well)
- Given I have the start/end points & distance, I could limit the efforts to a distance circle around the points rather than the city border … but that wouldn’t address the case where people do want to stay within the city
- Some kind of fallback in the ‘no incomplete streets’ scenario that somehow expands its search
🤷
---
### Author:  [@tev4](https://community.citystrides.com/u/tev4)
#### Post date: [September 21, 2026, 8:10pm UTC](https://community.citystrides.com/t/route-builder-cant-escape-a-completed-city/30148/3 "2026-09-21T20:10:48Z")
Thanks for the detailed explanation!