Methodology

Every number here can be checked. That is the point of the site, and it is worth being specific about what it means in practice.

Rules come from documents, not from memory

Where a result depends on an agreement, that agreement has been read. Not summarised from a search result, not recalled — read, from a copy of the official document, with the article and page noted.

This matters more than it sounds. While researching the Vancouver zone, a search engine confidently reported one agreement’s boundary wording; the actual PDF said something different. The discrepancy was only visible by opening the document.

Agreement text is quoted, not republished

Collective agreements belong to the unions and the bargaining parties who made them. This site quotes the passage needed to understand a result and links to the official document. It does not host searchable replicas of agreements it has no right to redistribute.

Boundaries are built from published data

Zone boundaries are assembled from official sources: the written definition in the agreement first, then published open data for the geography — municipal boundaries, road centrelines, coastlines and rivers, each under a licence that permits it, each attributed.

No boundary here is drawn from a model’s impression of where a line probably goes. A boundary that is confidently wrong by a block costs somebody a travel day, and it does it without ever looking wrong.

Progress is shown honestly, at the level of the piece

The zone pages report how many segments have data and how many do not, one by one. Where a piece is missing you can see exactly which piece and why. Nothing is switched on until the whole of it is built and checked by a person.

See where the zone work has got to

Some things are deliberately left undecided

Agreements do not answer every question. Where one is genuinely open — whether an island counts as inside a zone, where an area bounded by three roads closes — the gap is recorded as a gap. Filling it with a plausible guess would hide the one thing you most need to know.

What the tools will not do

They will not guess a date rollover, an agreement, a jurisdiction, a rounding direction, or which contract covers you. Where a choice changes the answer, you make it, and the result records what you chose.

No calculator here applies an agreement rule yet. Every threshold is one you entered, and every result says so.

Calculations are tested, separately from the interface

The arithmetic lives apart from the pages that display it and is covered by automated tests — including the cases that are easy to get wrong and hard to notice: midnight, multi-day gaps, daylight saving in both directions, and page counts that a spreadsheet would drift on.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, that is worth knowing about, and the fix belongs on the page rather than in a footnote. A contact route will be published alongside the first agreement-based results.