===== FILE: the-life-design.md ===== THE LIFE DESIGN — FOR THE WOVEN CITY Written 2026-10-15, before a line of it was built. The design for bringing Test 7 (the Woven City) to life. Its measures come from the civil-systems research banked the same morning (NACTO, MUTCD, IES, FHWA, TCRP, and the measured pedestrian studies) — the numbers here are the research's, not invented ones. THE STANDING BODY The weave already stands: 129 blocks, 800 fashion faces, 205 houses, 6 schools, 9 municipal blocks, 3 gas stations, 16 bus stops, 17 bridges. Life is not a rebuild. The world already carries a registry — every building, house, school, station and stop is an entry in one list, and the render, the collision, the routes and the Witness all read that same list. The living systems read it too. Nothing is placed twice; nothing can disagree with what is seen. ONE CLOCK A single clock rules the city: a full day in 24 game hours. The sun's path, the sky, the lit windows of the fashion, the street lamps, the signal plans, the citizens' schedules and the traffic density are all readings of that one hour. There are no private timers, so nothing can drift out of agreement with anything else. STREET LAMPS — AND WHETHER THEY SWITCH CORRECTLY They switch correctly because they are not switched by hand or by their own timers: a lamp's state is a reading of the sun. On at dusk, off at dawn, by the astronomical rule the research specifies — with a few minutes of scatter from lamp to lamp, the way real photocells differ, so a street kindles down its length instead of snapping on as one. Their placement follows the researched spacing: poles of 9 to 12 m on arterials, spaced about 2.5 to 3.5 times their height; less on lesser streets. Their light is rendered the phone-honest way — the head glows and a pool of light lies on the road beneath, an image's work, not a hundred burning point-lights — but the SWITCHING is true: state, hour and sun always agree, and a gate audits them against the clock. PEOPLE Every house is an address; someone lives there. Every tower block, market, school and municipal block is a workplace by kind: teachers to schools, clerks to the hall, firefighters to the station, shopkeepers to the market rows. Children belong to a school. Each citizen is assessed the way Test 1 proved: the departure is computed — work start minus the true route's travel time minus a margin — never staged. Each keeps their own measures for life, from the research: walking pace (young adults 1.55 m/s, teens and middle years 1.45, older 1.09, elderly and disabled 1.04), patience at crossings, headway habit. Bodies move on the nerves, heel and ankle doing their true work. The day has the measured skeleton: morning peak 06:30-09:00, a lunch pulse, school out at about 15:00, the evening peak 16:00-19:00, leisure until 23:00, then the city sleeps. TRAFFIC AND SIGNALS Cars travel the one street graph under the researched driving model: desired headways of 0.9 to 1.8 seconds, minimum gaps of 1.5 to 2.5 m, calm accelerations, and queues that discharge with the start-up wave — about half a second to a second of delay passing back car by car. Signals run real intervals: cycle 60 to 120 seconds by junction, yellow by the kinematic rule (about 3.2 s at 30 mph), all-red 1 to 2 s, WALK at least 7 s, and pedestrian clearance computed per crossing — its width divided by 1.07 m/s, plus buffer — with the vehicle phase forbidden to end before the walkers' phase does. Late at night the small junctions rest in flashing amber; at dawn they take up the full cycle again. At the seams between blocks, the King's adoption rule holds: a generated car crossing into the next block is noticed, taken and used — body, color and speed kept; only its orders change. BUSES The sixteen stops were planted before any bus existed: far-side of their intersections, about 330 apart, shelters on reserved corners. Buses run the two avenues and serve them in order. Dwell is computed, not scripted: a dead time of about 5 to 7 seconds, plus 3.0 to 3.8 seconds per boarding passenger at the front door, 1.3 to 2.0 per alighting passenger at the rear — the longer stream rules. A busy stop therefore holds its bus, the bus behind closes up, and bunching emerges on its own, as it does in real streets. Citizens bound for the bus wait clustered near the sign, facing the approach. THE LAW OF LEAVING AND RETURNING Nobody vanishes. The world has gates where the avenues meet the rim, and all leaving happens there, under distance and fog — a car drives out of sight; it never pops out of the world mid-frame. A citizen whose life takes them out of the city — a trip, an errand beyond the rim — becomes an AWAY record in the registry: who, in what car, gone at what hour, due back at what hour, computed by the same assessed arithmetic as every departure. The house stays theirs; the job keeps their place. When the hour comes, they re-enter at