Data story · Methodology explainer
Why “wheelchair accessible” is not enough information
Most access information is a single word attached to a building. But nobody visits a building. They make a journey, to a specific flat, ward, office or counter, and journeys fail at specific points a label cannot see.
A label describes a building; access happens on a route
Consider one residential tower. The journey to the ground-floor concierge involves a kerb, a forecourt and one automatic door: genuinely easy. The journey to a flat on the twentieth floor adds a controlled communal entrance that depends on someone answering, a lift that may or may not be working, and a long internal corridor. Same building, same “accessible” badge, completely different journeys. This is why SARScore scores access routes to destinations, never buildings, and why one address can carry several scores at once.
Journeys fail in stages
Every access journey has four places it can go wrong: the approach (can a vehicle actually stop; how far and over what surface), the entry (what does getting through the door depend on), vertical movement (stairs, lifts and what happens when the lift is out), and the internal journey (distance, doors and wayfinding to the final destination). A binary label collapses all four into one word. SARScore scores each stage from observed facts and shows the breakdown, so you can see not just how hard but where and why.
Some barriers should never be averaged
A route with no step-free alternative is not “moderately accessible on average”. For a wheelchair user it is closed. SARScore publishes decisive barriers (no step-free route, no lift to the destination, access dependent on another person responding) explicitly beside the score, and a route cannot present as easy while an unavoidable decisive barrier stands.
Access has a time dimension a label ignores
“Accessible” was true the day someone wrote it. Lifts fail, entrances move, works block pavements. Every SARScore shows when its route was last verified and how confident the evidence is; temporary conditions are tracked separately so a broken lift affects the route today without rewriting its permanent character; and where evidence is missing, the product says score not yet available instead of guessing. A measurement you can date is worth more than a label you cannot.