Methodology

This page explains what the labels on each guide mean, how the travel times were measured, and what a guide has to contain before we publish it. Every number carries its source and the date we last checked it, so you can look at the same evidence we did.

The labels

Car need

We use three categories rather than a rating out of five. Access differs too much between an Alpine valley and a New Hampshire one for a single number to mean the same thing in both.

A car is unnecessary: Car-free arrival is practical, daily needs are walkable or transit-served, and at least 80% of the ski areas in this page’s matrix are reachable on published transit during normal ski hours.
A car is helpful: The core trip works without a car, but a car materially expands your lodging, evening or mountain choices.
A car is essential: Ordinary access to the principal ski experience requires private transport.

The 80% threshold is measured against that page's own access matrix, not against every ski area in the region. A destination with two mountains, both bus-served, scoresunnecessary; a destination with nine mountains and one walkable hill does not.

Travel times

Times are door-to-lift in normal winter conditions — from a representative bed in the destination's principal lodging area to the base of the ski area's main lift. They are not straight-line distances, and they are not best-case times on an empty road.

Driving times assume ordinary winter traffic, not a storm day and not a holiday Saturday.
Transit times come from the operator's own published timetable, never from a third-party blog.
Walking times assume ski boots and a normal pace.

Where a time is an estimate rather than a verified measurement, the row says so.

“Transit-served”

A ski area is marked transit-served only when a published, scheduled service reaches it during normal ski hours and returns the same day. An intercity coach that passes the trailhead twice a day does not qualify, because you cannot use it to ski. Neither does a seasonal shuttle we could not confirm is currently running.

What makes a page publishable

A destination guide is not published until all of the following are true.

Every required section is present.
The access matrix has one row per ski area, each with a verified mode and time.
At least three specific drawbacks. “Weekends can be busy” is not a drawback.
At least two named alternative destinations with the decision boundary spelled out.
Every statistic carries its geography, reference year, source and retrieval date.
Every source is verified. Unclear licensing is treated as not publishable.
Every image has a named creator and a licence that permits commercial use and adaptation.

Pages that fail any of these carry a visible draft notice and are excluded from search indexing until they pass.

What this site does not cover

We do not publish mountain specifications — terrain breakdowns, lift inventories, snow reports or trail counts. Those belong to the mountain, not the town, and for the northeastern US they are maintained on NESKIS.

We also do not publish current lodging prices, rents, home values or pass prices. They rot faster than we can maintain them, and a stale price is worse than no price.

Corrections

Transit is the thing most likely to be wrong here. Routes get renumbered, shuttles get cut, and operators do not announce it. If a page says a bus exists and it does not, that is a real error and worth telling us about.