Loading Ableway
Field notes
Progress logs and design decisions from building Ableway — what shipped, what broke, what we counted before we coded. Written as we go, toward the 2027 launch.
Roughly 65,000 sidewalk ways in our launch region. About 17% have a surface tag. 61 tagged elevators, metro-wide. Why Ableway is building the map before the navigation.
A false "accessible" can strand someone for hours. A false "not accessible" costs an afternoon. The asymmetric consensus rules behind every Ableway score.
You research, you call, they say "fully accessible." Then you arrive. What the evidence says about why the phone call fails — and what Ableway is doing instead.
Static maps record that an elevator exists. They never record that it stopped working this morning. Here is the living layer Ableway is building for everything that changes.
A step-free entrance makes a restaurant accessible to a wheelchair user and still overwhelming for an autistic teenager on a busy Saturday. Accessibility was never one question — so we stopped scoring it like one.