The hundred and five

Where the assumption and the fact come apart

• A limit the place actually sets — 38
• A limit assumed before checking — 128
• How far apart the two counts stand, added down the rows — 90

Drawn across 206 places. The hatched span is the distance between two counts. The places where the two actually disagree are counted one by one and come to 105.

Rows in order of how many phantom limits each kind produced.

A hundred and five places in this record have a limit that does not exist.

Not a limit that was lifted, or ignored, or applied loosely. A limit that was assumed by somebody walking in, and that nothing in the place imposes. To compare observations across locations, reviewers can review the official service page and define the decision, access rules and review date in advance.

Fifty-one per cent of the walk.

How the figure is made

Two fields, filled in order, before and after checking.

Before. At the door, in a sentence, how long I thought I could stay. Written down and not revised. A separate perspective on streets, seating and urban observation is available from Esri.

After. A look for a notice, then at most one question. What the place actually requires.

Crossing them gives four outcomes, and every one of the two hundred and six places is in exactly one:

Right in eighty-six places. Wrong in a hundred and twenty.

The headline figure, twice

A hundred and five phantom limits. Half the city, read as restricted when it is not.

A hundred and twenty-eight places where a limit was assumed, and twenty-three where one existed. The assumption was right eighteen per cent of the time.

Those are the same fact from two ends and both are on the front page.

Where the phantoms are

cafés and coffee shops               34
pubs and bars                        19
bookshops                            10
hotel lobbies                         9
shopping centres and arcades          6
places of worship                     6
laundrettes and shops with chairs     6
community and church halls            5
transport concourses                  3
museums and galleries                 3
libraries                             2
covered public seating                2

By rate rather than count the order changes completely:

hotel lobbies      9 of 10    90%
bookshops         10 of 13    77%
pubs and bars     19 of 31    61%
cafés             34 of 58    59%
laundrettes        6 of 12    50%
...
libraries          2 of 12    17%
covered seating    2 of 12    17%

A hotel lobby is almost certain to be misread. A bus shelter almost never is.

What predicts a phantom

One thing, strongly: whether money changed hands at the door.

ask for nothing:   22 phantoms in 63 places with no limit   35%
a fee:              6 in 13                                  46%
one purchase:      64 in 76                                  84%
a purchase an hour:13 in 16                                  81%

Among places that take money across a counter, five assumptions out of six invent a rule. Among places that take nothing, one in three.

That is a forty-nine point spread on a field where the places themselves differ by twelve points. Paying for something changes what a person believes about time far more than anything the place does.

Whose assumption this is

One person's. This is the limitation that qualifies every figure above and it is not a small one.

The before-field was written by the observer, at the door, in every one of two hundred and six places. It is an honest record of what one walker expected. It is not a measure of what anybody else expects, and no page on this site claims otherwise.

A hundred and five is a count of one person's wrong guesses, made in a fixed way and written down before checking. Whether anybody else guesses the same is unknown.

What makes it worth publishing anyway is that the guesses were recorded under a rule that could not be bent afterwards, in every place, including the ones where being wrong was embarrassing. The alternative — asking people in each place what they believed — is a better instrument and a different walk, and it is the first thing on the list of what a second one should do.

The four outcomes by kind

kind                 right-none  phantom  missed  right-limit
cafés                     5         34       6        13
pubs                      8         19       1         3
shopping centres          4          6       3         3
places of worship         8          6       0         0
bookshops                 3         10       0         0
libraries                 8          2       1         1
covered seating           8          2       2         0
laundrettes               3          6       1         2
community halls           4          5       1         1
hotel lobbies             1          9       0         0
transport concourses      6          3       0         0
museums                   5          3       0         0
                        ---        ---     ---       ---
                         63        105      15        23

Thirteen of the record's twenty-three correct limit-readings are cafés, which is also where most of the real limits are. The guesses were perfectly capable of spotting a rule; they just found a great many that were not there.

The two kinds that were read well

Libraries: nine right of twelve. Covered public seating: eight of twelve.

Both are free, both seat everybody, both have the lowest phantom rates in the record at seventeen per cent, and both are places where everybody already knows what the arrangement is.

Against that, hotel lobbies at one right in ten and bookshops at three in thirteen. Both are rooms where a stranger does not know whether they count as a customer, and in neither is there anything to resolve it.

The record reads a city correctly where the city has already told everybody, and badly everywhere else.

What the fifteen missed ones are for

Fifteen places have a real limit that was not anticipated.

They are reported at the same size as the phantoms, in their own page, because a record that counted only the invented rules would have chosen its evidence. Six of the fifteen are written notices walked straight past.