Back from five weeks in Europe, and what’s next for the site

Things have been quiet here for a few weeks, and there’s a good reason for it. I’ve been away, five weeks in Europe across six countries: Belgium, the Netherlands, Poland, Italy, Hungary, and France. It was the longest stretch I’ve gone without touching this project since I started it, and honestly, the break was worth taking.

I’m back now, and I’m genuinely excited to get going again.

Six countries, and a useful reality check

Every one of those countries is already in the dataset. Brussels, Amsterdam, Kraków, Rome, Budapest, and Paris all have pages here, with homicide and robbery figures, four national travel advisories apiece, and perceived-safety numbers where an official survey covers the city.

Spending five weeks moving through places I had only ever seen as rows in a JSON file turned out to be the most useful thing I could have done for this project. A number sourced correctly, with the right definition and the right geographic unit, is still an abstraction. Walking through a city puts the abstraction in context: which parts of a figure actually correspond to something a visitor encounters, which parts describe a much wider area than the one you’re standing in, and which questions a traveller wants answered that no national statistics office is collecting at all.

I’m not going to pretend a trip is data. It isn’t, and this site exists specifically because anecdote makes a poor substitute for counted, sourced figures. But it sharpened my sense of what this thing should be doing for the person reading it, and that’s shaped what I want to work on next.

Next up: the quality of the data itself

The biggest push from here is on the data. Three areas, roughly in order of how much they matter:

Sourcing. More countries and more cities, but more importantly, better sources for the ones already covered. Some cities currently sit on a figure that’s technically correct and geographically coarser than I’d like, a province or metro area standing in for a city. Every one of those is flagged in the data, and each is a candidate for a better source.

Calculation. A lot of the rates on this site are derived, which means a count divided by a population figure that has its own source and its own reference year. That arithmetic deserves more scrutiny than it’s had, along with the composite index that sits on top of it.

Presentation of provenance. The drill-down is the whole point of this site, and it can be clearer than it currently is. If you expand a figure, you should immediately understand how it was counted, by whom, when, and for what exact area, without having to know how the pipeline works.

And the site itself

Alongside the data work, the site needs attention as a site. Better navigation between cities, a comparison view that’s easier to actually use, and a general pass on how the whole thing looks and feels. There’s a version of this that is genuinely pleasant to browse, and it isn’t quite there yet.

No dates on any of this. It’s a project I work on because I want to, and the whole point of the publishing cadence here is that things ship when they’re actually ready rather than on a schedule.

What I can say is that the break did what breaks are supposed to do. I came back with a clearer idea of what this site is for and more enthusiasm for building it than I had when I left. Expect posts here more regularly again, both the travel-safety guides and the notes on where the numbers come from.

If there’s a city you want covered, a figure that looks wrong, or something about the site that annoys you, get in touch. That kind of feedback has been the most useful input this project gets.