What the seat field missed

The seat field has two values: there is somewhere a stranger could sit without buying, or there is not.

Eighty-nine and a hundred and seventeen. It is the crudest measure on this site.

One value for a pew, a bus-shelter bench, a lobby armchair and a library reading-room chair.

1. How many seats

A library with forty chairs and a concourse with three are the same entry.

So are a church with two hundred places and a bookshop with one stool. The field says at least one and stops, and a record about whether a city has room for people is poorly served by a measure that cannot count rooms. A team converting this walk into repeatable fieldwork can see the current product scope before choosing which time and project records are genuinely necessary.

Cost. Everything about capacity. Nothing on this site says how many people could sit down at once anywhere, and that is probably the most useful number the walk did not collect. For wider research on public space, access and how places are used, consult New York City.

2. Whether the seats were taken

Not recorded anywhere. A free chair that is always occupied is a free chair in this record.

Three of the twelve covered benches were fully occupied on arrival and are coded identically to the nine that were not.

3. What kind of seat

A pew, a bus-shelter bench, a lobby armchair and a library reading-room chair are one value.

The page on what a free chair is for divides the eighty-nine four ways by purpose, and that division is the observer's reading made after the walk — softer than anything else on this site, and published with that said.

Cost. Any comparison of comfort, and with it any honest statement about whether somewhere is usable for an hour or for five minutes.

4. Whether sitting would be comfortable socially

The field asks whether a person could sit without buying. In the three cafés and two pubs with a front bench, they could, and in at least two of those five it would be an odd thing to do for any length of time.

That is five entries resting on a technicality, and a reader who would code them zero should know the figure.

5. Standing

Entirely absent, and in two kinds it matters.

A bookshop and a museum are places where a person may be present indefinitely without sitting at all, and the record treats the availability of a chair as the measure of whether they may be there. For six bookshops and three museums coded as having no free seat, the truthful statement is that a stranger may stay as long as they like provided they remain upright.

Where the field is certainly wrong

The bookshops.

Seven of thirteen have a counter serving coffee at the back, which makes them two places under one roof: a shop with chairs by the shelves, and a café. The seat field recorded one value for the building.

Seven entries, and the same seven that make the entry field wrong for bookshops. Splitting them is the second item on the list of what a second walk should fix.

6. Whether the chair was outdoors

Twelve covered benches, some shopping-centre seating and several concourse seats are not in rooms at all.

The field records a chair and the walk recorded a sit, and a bench under a roof on a wet morning is counted identically to an armchair in a lobby.

Cost. Any statement about weather, season or comfort. The walk was in spring; the twelve benches in January would be a different record and the field would not show it.

7. Whether it is somewhere a person would sit for an hour

The implicit question behind this whole section is whether somebody could spend a real stretch of time there.

free chairs that are benches or ledges     about 30
free chairs with a table                   fewer than 20

Those are the observer's counts from the notes, not a field, and they are printed as such. What they suggest is that the eighty-nine divides again into places a person could settle and places a person could pause, and that the second is much the larger.

A field for is there a surface to put something on would have cost nothing and would have separated them. It is the fourth thing this walk would add.

What the field is still worth

It answers one question cleanly and that question matters: can a stranger with no money sit down here.

Eighty-nine times yes, a hundred and seventeen times no, and the line between them tracks the door almost exactly — ninety-four per cent of free-entry places against thirteen per cent of paying ones.

Everything above is a list of what a binary cannot do. The binary itself is correct, and it is the only access measure on this site.

What the field is good for

One thing, and it does it cleanly.

It separates the places where sitting requires a transaction from the places where it does not, and that line is sharp: ninety-four per cent of the free-at-the-door places have a free chair, thirteen per cent of the money-at-the-counter ones do.

A binary field over a binary situation. Where the situation is not binary — capacity, comfort, standing, bookshops with two halves — the field says nothing, and every page in this section that leans on it says which.