Operator orientation

Get from "huh?" to a defensible audit in 30 minutes.

Six sections, each answers a real first-week question. Skim section 1 for context, then jump to whichever step you're on.

1. Orient yourself

What Urban Pulse is — and what it isn't.

Urban Pulse scores any neighborhood on 10 evidence-backed risk drivers (heat, air, noise, flood, mobility, housing affordability, streetscape quality, peer benchmark, value-at-stake, defensibility) and turns the result into a council-ready PDF in about 30 seconds.

It is not a GIS replacement, a real-estate valuation tool, or a substitute for in-person engagement. It is a fast first read on whether a place is heading for amenity desert, gentrification, stagnation or stable health — defensibly enough to put in front of a planning committee.

The product has three workspaces in the left dock: Pulse (the audit engine you'll live in), Bio-Sync (biodiversity v0), and Intelligence (heat intelligence, soon).

2. Score a neighborhood

Drop a pin → pick a mode → press one button.

1. Open /audit and click anywhere on the map.
2. Choose how you'd reach essentials — walking, cycling, transit or driving — and a time budget (default 15 minutes).
3. Click "Score this neighborhood". The isochrone is fetched, ~600 OpenStreetMap POIs are classified into the six Moreno categories, and all 10 risk drivers compute in <30s.
4. The verdict pill at the top tells you the headline: stable, gentrification, stagnation or amenity desert.

3. Read the workspace

Three detail levels. Pick the one that matches your audience.

The Detail level toggle in the sidebar header changes which cards render — the math is identical at every level.

Mayor verdict, value-at-stake band, top-3 insights only. Use this for a two-minute briefing.
Planner adds risk-driver cards, intervention stack and the What-If sliders. This is the daily-driver level.
Analyst adds Moreno breakdown, Jacobs vitality, framework conformance, CNOSSOS-EU reproducibility, peer-benchmark distances. Use when defending a number.

Hover any underlined term (ELR, Lden, HCO, Moreno…) for a one-line plain-English definition pulled from the central glossary.

4. Model interventions

Stack catalog projects or drag the What-If sliders.

The Intervention Stack lets you compose up to 12 catalog projects (protected bike lanes, bus priority, tree canopy, missing-middle infill, etc.) — each carries a CapEx band, lead time, and additive score deltas. Five of them also re-shape the isochrone, so the map retints in real time.

The What-If card holds two live levers that don't need a catalog project: hydrology retrofit (impervious surface ± 30pp, green dampener ± 30%) and acoustic retrofit (Lden − 5 to + 15 dB). The headline Resilience score updates instantly.

Every uplift estimate is a band (low / central / high), never a point estimate.

5. Save & share the report

27+ pages, three layouts, three variants, plain-English mode.

From any audit, click "Save & share report". The Report Studio gives you three orthogonal choices:

Layout — visual, data-dense, or strategic. Same content, different rhythm.
Variant — executive (8 pages, council brief), full (27 pages, defensible), or technical (adds the appendix + bibliography).
Plain English — when on, risk-page section headings translate from the technical register (Lden / HCO / ELR…) into language a resident understands.

Edit the cover, add a "prepared for" line, and tighten the executive summary in the rich-text editor. Share-link tokens are revocable.

6. Defend the numbers

Methodology version, confidence, freshness — all open.

Two badges sit next to every audit:

Confidence — high / medium / low, derived from POI count, override count, parks & transit data depth. Low confidence reports use measured language.
Freshness — does this audit run on the live 2025.05.sQ1 methodology? Stale audits deep-link into a side-by-side diff.

Every metric — formula, parameters, citations — lives in The Engine Room. Every PDF page footer carries the audit ID + methodology version + date.

When the methodology bumps, the "What's new" modal surfaces the changes and links you to the live changelog.

7. Speak the language

Every term we use, defined in one sentence.

Urban Pulse uses a small, fixed vocabulary — Moreno, ELR, Lden, HCO, Jacobs vitality, isochrone, value-at-stake. Every one of these is defined in plain English in the public Glossary, and is hover-tippable anywhere it appears in the workspace via the <TermTip> component.

The same plain-English layer is available in the PDF: toggle "Plain English" in the Report Studio and the risk-page section headings translate from the technical register (Lden, HCO, ELR…) into resident-facing phrases (Day & Night Noise, Rent Pressure & Displacement, Daily-Needs Balance…).

The glossary is the single source of truth — never invent a new synonym in a card or PDF page; either reuse an existing term or add it to src/lib/glossary.ts.