Can My Buggy Get Through
the Door?
10 things I learned calling 2,000 London cafes about pushchair access.
Nobody has ever collected this data
3.57 million children aged 0-4 in the UK. 250,000 families with babies born in London each year. Zero systematic data on which venues a pushchair can get into. Genuinely greenfield.
183 calls sounded like a broken fax machine
Twilio sends audio in mulaw at 8kHz. ElevenLabs expected a different format. 183 London cafes got a phone call from an AI that sounded like garbled noise. The fix took one API call. The lesson took longer.
"You can definitely get the pram through the door. It's nearly one and a half metres wide."
Jumi Cheese, Stoke Newington
'Are you pram-friendly?' is a question venues have never been asked
The responses are genuine because nobody has a scripted answer for this. Some are enthusiastic. Some are honest. Some are creative. The surprise in their voice is data.
Only 8 out of 2,093 calls detected it was an AI
That's 0.4%. The one-question, 20-second format is short enough that most people answer before they think about who's asking.
The amber category is where the real information lives
Green and red are simple. But 'fifteen steps down, then it's all on the flat' is information no binary yes/no captures. The nuance category is where the value is.
"We're a basement venue, so you've got about fifteen steps to get down. Once you're in, it's all on the flat."
606 Club, Chelsea
Pubs that say 'over 18s only' are doing you a favour
The Kenton Pub, Satan's Whiskers, Barrio Shoreditch. No ambiguity. No arriving with a pushchair to discover you can't get in. An honest no is more useful than a misleading yes.
3x daily calling means the map grows while I sleep
10:30am, 2pm, 5pm. Every day. 300 calls per run. Fetch, classify, match, deploy, notify. No human in the loop. 64 venues two days ago. 231 now.
Venue data quality follows a power law
Hackney has 248 venues in the database. Clapham has 2. Priority retry ranking calls underserved areas first, filling gaps rather than piling up data where you already have it.
The civic data angle is bigger than the parenting angle
Councils are legally required to care about accessibility but don't collect this data. This is civic infrastructure that should exist but doesn't. The parenting audience gets you users. The civic angle gets you institutions.
Test one call before you run a thousand
183 garbled calls. Duplicate calls from missing deduplication. Prompt drift from 'quick question' to 'silly question'. Every mistake amplified by scale. Every fix obvious in hindsight.
"The pram can't go to the museum, but you can leave the pram upstairs and carry the baby downstairs."
Viktor Wynd Museum, Hackney
Made by a London dad who got tired of guessing.
