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Allow un-routable neighborhoods to be recommended#806

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rachelekm merged 3 commits intodevelopfrom
feature/rkm/allow-unroutable-recommendations
Mar 11, 2026
Merged

Allow un-routable neighborhoods to be recommended#806
rachelekm merged 3 commits intodevelopfrom
feature/rkm/allow-unroutable-recommendations

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@rachelekm
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@rachelekm rachelekm commented Mar 6, 2026

Overview

We are no longer using a neighborhoods "routability" as a constraint to be recommended. A neighborhood that has a 2+ hour commute by car or transit can now be recommended as well as neighborhoods that may not have transit routing but are close enough to walk.

  • All neighborhoods are now added to the recommended list by default and still sorted by score
  • If a user select any filter settings, ECC or region, then neighborhoods that don't fit that configuration are moved to the "not a match" list
  • There are no changes to the legend text and the "not a match" list description will be updated in follow up work.

Checklist

  • fixup! commits have been squashed
  • CHANGELOG.md updated with summary of features or fixes, following
    Keep a Changelog guidelines
  • README.md updated if necessary to reflect the changes
  • Run ./scripts/format to lint, format, and fix the application source code.
  • CI passes after rebase

Demo

Neighborhood close to destination but previously un-routable and un-recommended. With updates now recommended:
Screenshot 2026-03-06 at 5 58 34 PM

Testing Instructions

  • scripts/server
  • Login and set travel configurations to transit
  • Set destination to 700 Boylston St
  • Confirm all neighborhoods are now recommended
  • Confirm Boston - Back Bay one of the top neighborhoods (if commute time is very important)
  • Adjust importance settings and confirm neighborhoods list updates
  • Adjust variable filters and confirm neighborhoods appropriately move to the "not a match" list

Resolves #805

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@aaronxsu aaronxsu left a comment

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This looks good and is working as advertised.

Unrelated to this PR and might not be the case on staging or prod in the future: I noticed some neighborhood images' URLs might be outdated locally. We might be running the scripts again on staging and production so this will not be relevant? Or maybe we create a tech debt card to fix this so that if the URL is broken, we show a placeholder etc? Anyway, this does not block merging this PR- just putting this on your radar!

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Thanks, @aaronxsu!

Unrelated to this PR and might not be the case on staging or prod in the future: I noticed some neighborhood images' URLs might be outdated locally. We might be running the scripts again on staging and production so this will not be relevant? Or maybe we create a tech debt card to fix this so that if the URL is broken, we show a placeholder etc? Anyway, this does not block merging this PR- just putting this on your radar!

Good catch, I didn't see this! I won't open up an issue for it for now since it looks like this example is working on staging (screenshot below) and we will need to re-run data updates soon anyways. I wonder if these URLs are referencing the old thumbnail-sized images that are no longer on S3? We created new full-sized images as part of the frontend rewrite and any vestigial thumbnails should've been cleaned up in latest dev data so hopefully this just resolves once we update with new data.

Screenshot 2026-03-11 at 3 24 14 PM

If a neighborhood is unroutable we don't create an scaled accessibility weight but instead define a default weight value, 1. This is the "best" weight, but because there is no route information to evaluate these neighborhoods were previously being binned in the "too far" list and the accessibility sorting doesn't matter. Now that unroutable neighborhoods can be recommended, the weight actually holds value in the overall score. Instead we should set these neighborhoods to the worst weighted value, 0, so unroutable neighborhoods will be sorted to the bottom of the recommendation list, as needed.
@rachelekm rachelekm force-pushed the feature/rkm/allow-unroutable-recommendations branch from 16f8fb3 to 0cd5f83 Compare March 11, 2026 19:56
@rachelekm rachelekm merged commit b12ce9e into develop Mar 11, 2026
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@rachelekm rachelekm deleted the feature/rkm/allow-unroutable-recommendations branch March 11, 2026 20:07
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Allow un-routable neighborhoods to be recommended

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