Two hours, where there is a limit at all

Thirty-eight places in this record limit how long a stranger may sit. Here is how long they give.

median written limit     2 hours      (21 places)
median told limit        90 minutes   (17 places)
median assumed limit     60 minutes   (128 places)

Everything a place actually says is longer than what gets assumed about it.

The gap, stated plainly

The observer walked into a hundred and twenty-eight places expecting a limit, and the expectation, where it could be put in minutes, was usually an hour. Before adding another reporting layer, the project lead can check the service before a field pilot and test the smallest useful setup on one representative route.

Of the thirty-eight places that do limit staying, thirty-one give longer than the limit assumed for that place before checking. For independent context on inclusive places and field research, review material from Dezeen.

Where a limit exists, it is usually about twice what was expected. Where it does not exist, the expectation was of one anyway.

That sentence is the whole of this record in two clauses, and it is why the next section is the longest on the site.

Why an hour

The record cannot say, and the assumption belongs to one person, so the question is not really answerable from here. Three things are worth putting down anyway.

A cup lasts about an hour. In a café — and forty-seven of the hundred and twenty-eight assumptions were in cafés — the obvious unit of time available is the drink. An hour is roughly how long one plausibly lasts.

An hour is the unit people measure meetings in. It is the default length of almost every arranged thing.

Nothing contradicts it. A hundred and sixty-eight places say nothing at all, so an assumption of an hour is never corrected.

The third is the only one the record supports, and it supports it strongly: the silence is near-total, and whatever a person assumes inside it is what they go on assuming.

Who gives the longest

The four longest limits — two of three hours, two of four — are a library study area, a second library room, a shopping centre's seating by a car park, and a laundrette with a wash cycle on the wall.

None of them is a limit on a person. Each is the duration of something else, with the person permitted to last as long as it does.

So the longest permissions in this record are incidental, and the longest permission addressed to somebody sitting is two hours.

Who gives the shortest

The two half-hour limits are both covered public seating, both phrased about loitering.

After those, five places at one hour: three cafés, a shopping centre, and a community hall.

What the medians cannot carry

They are medians of thirty-eight. Twenty-one and seventeen observations split two ways. A difference of half an hour between them is a difference of a few places moving a step.

The assumed median is one person's. A hundred and twenty-eight guesses by one observer, recorded honestly and belonging to nobody else. It is not a measure of what anybody in that city believes.

Nothing is weighted by how much the place is used. A library study room with a four-hour limit and a bus shelter with thirty minutes count equally.

No consequence is attached. Not one of the thirty-eight states what happens when the time is up.

The thirty-eight by kind

cafés and coffee shops              19   (9 written, 10 told)
shopping centres and arcades         6   (4, 2)
pubs and bars                        4   (1, 3)
laundrettes and shops with chairs    3   (2, 1)
libraries                            2   (2, 0)
covered public seating               2   (2, 0)
community and church halls           2   (1, 1)
                                    ---
                                     38

Seven kinds. The other five — places of worship, bookshops, hotel lobbies, transport concourses, museums — have no limits at all.

Half the limits in the city are in cafés, and two thirds of the written ones are in cafés and shopping centres.

The highest rate is not the highest count

By count, cafés dominate. By rate, they do not.

shopping centres     6 of 16    38%
cafés               19 of 58    33%
laundrettes          3 of 12    25%
community halls      2 of 11    18%
libraries            2 of 12    17%
covered seating      2 of 12    17%
pubs                 4 of 31    13%

A shopping centre is the readiest place in the city to tell somebody how long they may sit, and it is also one of the two kinds that asks nothing at the door and seats everybody for free.

The pub is the opposite on both counts: it charges at a counter, seats almost nobody for nothing, and limits less than any kind that limits at all.

The comparison this section will not make

A reader may want to know whether two hours is generous.

Nothing here can answer that. There is no price, no comparison with any other city, no measure of how long anybody actually wanted to stay, and no view about what a place owes a stranger.

What the record can say is narrower: the places in this city that limit staying give more time than they are assumed to, and the places that do not limit it are assumed to anyway. Both halves are about the distance between what is said and what is supposed, and neither is about whether two hours is long enough.