Downtown Ledger

How this record is made

Every row in the ledger is on it because a peer downtown has the thing or the city itself has proposed it, never because the author thinks a downtown ought to. Every judgment about a walk is one person's estimate of what a typical pedestrian would do, recorded the same way each time, with a reason on every no.

The ledger

A row is a kind of thing a downtown has or does not: a grocery, a pharmacy, a hospital, a bus hub, residents. Each row is present, absent, partial or proposed for downtown Providence, with the place named if it is there and a source on the call.

A row is on the list for one of two reasons only: a peer downtown has the thing inside its own declared boundary, or the city itself has proposed it. Nothing is on the list because the author thinks a downtown ought to have it.

For the missing rows, years out is how long the thing takes to grow. Peer-derived rows are years out because demand is missing; proposed rows are years out because of what has to happen first, and each of those is listed with a source. A dependency without a source is not shown.

The peers and their boundaries

Each comparison downtown is measured inside a boundary its own city drew.

The walks

Whether a place is inside downtown, adjacent to it, or outside is declared, with a one-line reason, not computed. Each place is indexed to a mode: a destination for a driver is not the same thing as a destination on foot.

A walk is a judgment about one link between two places: would a typical pedestrian make it. Not the recorder, who would walk almost anything; the average person standing there. Recorded twice where it splits: once for someone arriving in the city, once for someone who lives here. Every no and every maybe carries a reason in plain words, and the reason is the checkable part.

Most bad walks are refused before the first step, so the main observation is a sightline taken at the origin, facing the route. Block-face counts are taken only on routes where the sightline says go and people still do not.

What is still blank

Blanks are shown, not hidden. As of this build:

Sources

The data

The entire record, including every blank, is one file. The site is a rendering of it and nothing else.