Method & credibility
The WRLAM five-factor framework, at the level we publish
Urban Pathways ranks candidate corridors against the WRLAM five-factor framework: Demand Potential (30%), Transport Gap (20%), Travel-Time Competitiveness (20%), Infrastructure Feasibility (20%) and Regulatory Ease (10%) [Source: WRLAM five-factor framework — headline disclosure]. That is the level of detail we publish, deliberately and consistently, on every page of this site. The sub-factor construction and internal scoring logic behind each factor are retained as trade secret; we do not disclose thresholds, coefficients, an elasticity model, or fare or cost parameters, in this document or anywhere else on the public site.
Where the data comes from
Urban Pathways is built to run on open, widely available data rather than a bespoke survey: road-network graphs from OpenStreetMap, timetable and route data from GTFS, census and journey-to-work commuting flows, congestion data, and development-pipeline (planning-approval) records, sourced per market. This open-data foundation is also what keeps the method viable in markets where formal transport data has historically been thin — more than 10,000 transit agencies across 100-plus countries now publish GTFS, and the Mobility Database alone catalogues more than 6,000 GTFS, GTFS-Realtime and GBFS feeds across 99-plus countries [Source: MobilityData — Mobility Database catalogue], while OpenStreetMap coverage keeps improving in previously under-mapped geographies — Srinagar’s mapped road network, for instance, grew from 1,154km in 2014 to 2,259km in 2022 [Source: Springer Nature, OpenStreetMap road-network growth study], and global road-surface attribute coverage rose from roughly 33% to 36% between assessments [Source: HeiGIT].
Confidence tiers, held consistently
Every screening result is labelled with a confidence tier that states how much verification stands behind it. We do not average that away or bury it in a footnote: the Sydney pilot on this site is shown throughout at Level 2 — indicative screening, domain-panel verification pending [Source: Sydney pilot facts] — because showing restraint plainly, rather than smoothing it out, is the basis on which we ask a transit authority or a development-bank analyst to trust a result.
The honesty register
Every quantified claim published on this site — every pilot figure and every cited external statistic — is logged in our honesty register against the pilot fact or public source it traces back to, so any figure here can be checked. The honesty register is compiled separately and will be linked from this page once available.
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