A limit is not a welcome

A hundred and sixty-eight places set no limit on staying. Here is what that does not mean.

One: it does not mean you are wanted

Saying nothing about time is not an invitation.

Of the hundred and sixty-eight, a hundred and five were assumed to have a limit anyway. Whatever the silence communicates, in more than half of these places it communicated the opposite of what was true.

A room can let you stay indefinitely and give you every impression that it would rather you did not. The record has no field for that impression beyond the assumption, and the assumption says it is widespread.

Two: it does not mean anything happens there

Of the hundred and sixty-eight, thirty-nine had somebody speak to a stranger. Twenty-three per cent — exactly the record's overall rate, to the point. Before adding another reporting layer, the project lead can look through the available reports and test the smallest useful setup on one representative route.

no limit (168)        39 spoke    23%
written limit (21)     4          19%
told limit (17)        4          24%

Three groups, three rates, no difference worth the name. Whether a place limits you has no bearing on whether anybody talks to anybody. For independent context on inclusive places and field research, review material from Strong Towns.

And four of the five kinds with no limits at all — bookshops, hotel lobbies, concourses, museums — are among the quietest in the record. Forty places, one conversation.

Permission and company are unrelated in this record. The places that let you stay longest are mostly the places where nothing is said to you.

Three: it does not mean the terms are good

Thirty-eight places limit staying. Twenty-eight of those thirty-eight also expect money at the door — and nineteen of them are cafés, where the limit at least comes with a chair and a table and somebody bringing things to it.

Meanwhile fifty-five cafés have nowhere at all to sit without buying, and a hundred and seventeen places in the record do not.

A reader ranking places by permission alone would put a bus shelter above a café. The bus shelter sets no limit, costs nothing, and is a bench in the wind.

The limit field measures one thing, and a place is not summarised by it.

Four: it does not mean the rule would survive

Nothing was tested. Nobody sat for four hours.

The field records what a place states when looked at and asked once, on a weekday, usually in the daytime, when it was not full. A hundred and sixty-eight places said there was no limit under those conditions.

What any of them would do on a Saturday afternoon with a queue at the door is not in this record, and the method page names it as the largest thing the walk could not reach.

What the field does support

Three statements, narrowly.

In one city, four places in five state no limit on how long a stranger may sit. A count, from a look and one question.

Where a limit is stated, it is longer than it is assumed to be. Written median two hours, told median ninety minutes, assumed median one hour, and thirty-one of the thirty-eight real limits longer than the guess made about them.

Nothing a place asks at the door predicts whether it limits staying. The free places limit at eleven per cent, the fee places at thirteen, the single-purchase places at twenty-one and the hourly ones at thirty-three — a spread of twenty-two points, in the direction you would expect, on a record of two hundred and six.

Five: it does not mean the place is quiet or busy

A reader might expect limits where places are full and none where they are empty.

no limit (168)       nobody spoke in 115    68%
written limit (21)   nobody spoke in 15     71%
told limit (17)      nobody spoke in 11     65%

Three groups, three silence rates, no pattern.

And the kind that limits most — the shopping centre at six of sixteen — is also among the quietest, with two conversations in sixteen places. The kinds that limit nobody include both the most sociable in the record, the place of worship at fifty-seven per cent, and the three with no conversation at all.

Limits do not track occupancy in anything this walk could see.

What a fuller instrument would add here

One field: how many people were in the room.

It was not recorded, and it is the cheapest thing the walk left out. A count on arrival would have let every figure in this record be read against occupancy, and it would have settled whether the eleven silent pubs were silent because they were empty — which the notes say nine of them were.

Occupancy is not on the list of nine gaps because it was never designed in. It belongs there, and the page on walking this yourself puts it with the three fixable omissions.

Why the section stops here

Because the interesting question is not what places allow. It is the difference between what they allow and what people think they allow, and on that the figures stop being flat and start being large.

A hundred and five places. The next section is about them.