Correction: the other cities do have comparable data — our matcher just can't find it

The briefing and the last two posts carried this line:

No substantive SDG indicator has matched outside NYC.

True of our matcher. Read as a statement about the cities, it is wrong, and it was phrased so it would be read that way. Correcting it.

The data is there

Searching Chicago's and Boston's catalogs directly, by hand, for the four indicators NYC is crosswalked on:

Chicago's Traffic Crashes — Crashes is structurally the same thing as the NYC dataset behind our road-deaths card. Boston publishes a dataset literally called Vision Zero Fatality Records — the same programme, the same concept, named almost identically to what we used for NYC.

What our matcher did with it

Querying Boston for "Death rate due to road traffic injuries":

0.486  Traffic-Related Data
0.467  City of Boston Contract Award
0.444  My Neighborhood Dataset
0.387  Trash Collection Days
...
#23    Vision Zero Fatality Records        (0.286)

The correct dataset ranked 23rd of 235, below a contract-award file. No threshold rescues that; it is a retrieval failure, not a calibration one.

The matcher is not uniformly blind — querying homicide returns Homicide Clearance Rate at rank 1, because the word "homicide" appears in the title. It works when the vocabulary happens to line up and fails when a city names the same concept differently, which cities routinely do. "Vision Zero" is a programme name, not a description of its contents.

The honest position

• Chicago and Boston hold data comparable to what NYC is crosswalked on. Air quality in Chicago, road fatalities in both, crime in both.
• Some gaps are real. Neither publishes municipal waste tonnage in the DSNY sense, and Boston's only air dataset is building emissions rather than ambient concentrations.
• Our matcher cannot find what is there. That was already the stated conclusion — "nothing shows the matcher can lead" — but stating it alongside "no indicator matched outside NYC" implied the cities were empty. They are not.

This is the third time on this project that an automated check produced a confident answer a person overturns by reading for five minutes: the chartable flag that ignored human grades, the screen that reported 689 having recorded 9, and now a matcher whose silence was mistaken for absence.

A null result from a tool you have measured at ~50% precision is not evidence of absence. We wrote that lesson into the spec as R1 and then made the mistake anyway, in our own prose, about our own tool.