My partner and I were in Newcastle. I was trying to get from the hotel to the Baltic. It was a disaster.

We tried Google Maps. We tried Apple Maps. We tried anything we could find. Nothing takes into account the realities of travelling by wheelchair. There is an accessibility mode in Google Maps, but it doesn't actually work. So we tried swapping to the cycling mode, thinking that might work, but cycling mode will allow you to carry your bike up and down stairs, or require you to carry it.

And this is not a Newcastle problem. The problem exists everywhere, every city, every town, every village. Same thing in Glasgow and Edinburgh. Edinburgh is only the easiest one to point at, because Lee Evans has a line about it being a city designed by M. C. Escher. Those are angles that are difficult, that could be difficult for a fit, able-bodied individual, and impossible for many even powered wheelchairs.

The maps were not short of a feature. They were short of the data underneath it. Nothing takes into account factors like road quality, road closures, pavement surface quality, weather.

So I started building a map that actually did proper wayfinding, and pulled in much richer data sources. Road quality. Road closures. Pavement surface quality. Weather. Dropped kerbs.

That list is the product. A general map treats a pavement as a line between two points, and everything I have listed is a property of that line that it does not hold. You cannot bolt a mode onto a data model that has never recorded whether a kerb is dropped.

I built it myself. I was vibe-coding the product, which is worth saying plainly, because I have spent a lot of my career arguing for accessibility inside other people's roadmaps and this is the one where I stopped arguing and opened an editor.

It was an early project for me in that space, and I am in the process of rebuilding because of what I have learned since. That is what Causewayside is.