The reason that was not counted

Text: an original contemporary opinion-column-style practice extract.

The town's consultation card asked why I still used the footbridge over the canal. It offered four boxes: "shortest route", "safer route", "exercise", or "visiting someone". I used it because it was the only place where my morning walk and my daughter's route to school overlapped; we often met there for five minutes. None of the boxes described that.

The card allowed one tick. I selected 'visiting someone' because it came closest and explained the overlap in the comments space beneath, but the tick made a shared routine sound like an occasional visit. In the published summary, the responses appeared as totals under the four headings. My written explanation was absent, not because it was too long, but because the summary had no category in which to put it.

Counting answers is useful when a consultation needs a clear pattern. Yet a choice can be genuine without being simple. The bridge was not merely a route or a meeting place: its value came from combining those things. A form that makes people choose one reason may produce tidy totals while leaving out the reasons people actually give.

In this extract, the writer questions whether a consultation form can represent the reasons people give for using a public place.