Two probes done. One unblocks the open decision; the other says the NYC side needs the same rigour we gave the UN side.

The peer-comparator question has a third answer

URBANIZATION--DOU_CITY is a real population-weighted aggregate, not a token. For the US it covers 121M of 347M people, and the city figure differs meaningfully from the national one (PM2.5 2019: 7.57 city vs 7.18 national).

The important part: it exists for other countries too, with full 10-year series. PM2.5 city aggregate, 2019 — US 7.57, Canada 6.87, UK 10.06, Japan 11.32, Germany 11.92, France 12.03, Colombia 15.97, Mexico 19.04.

So we can compare NYC against the city aggregate of other countries using nothing but UN Data Commons — one source, one method, one unit, consistent DEGURBA definitions. That is arguably better than the NYC-vs-London comparison we originally promised: no cherry-picked comparator, no second source to reconcile. Recommending this as the primary framing.

Caveat to state on any such chart: NYC is itself inside the US city aggregate (~7% of it).

The NYC half needed the same treatment

Built a pair probe that verifies both sides of every crosswalk entry. It immediately found things a human eye would have missed:

• NYPD complaint data carries junk pre-2006 incident dates — 17 murders in 1990, when the real figure was over 2,000. Filtering to 2006+ gives the true series (569 in 2006 → 277 in 2025).
• PM2.5 has summer/winter rows alongside the annual mean. Query the obvious way and you silently average three different measures together.
• DSNY’s month field is text ("2026 / 08"), so date_extract_y fails outright — and rows before 1993 predate curbside recycling entirely.
• The published Recycling Diversion and Capture Rates dataset has not updated since 2020; the live path is deriving the rate from monthly tonnage.

Two of three pairs now resolve end to end. Homicide is blocked: NYC publishes a count, the UN publishes a rate per 100,000, and the Census ACS denominator now needs a free API key.

What the numbers say

PM2.5 — NYC is below the US city average and the gap is widening: 8.93 vs 9.23 in 2014, 6.60 vs 7.57 in 2019.

Waste recycling — NYC at 17.2% against 23.6% for the US in 2018. But NYC’s figure is DSNY residential collection only, while the UN municipal-waste definition includes commercial. The gap is probably overstated, and the honest answer is that these are not measuring the same universe.

That contrast is the demo. One indicator where NYC looks good, one where it looks bad, and the bad one carries a caveat that changes the interpretation. It is the argument for the whole project in two charts.

Crosswalk status · python3 probe/pair_probe.py