How Steep Is That Sidewalk? A Digital Map for People with Disabilities
yesmagazine.org
yesmagazine.org
Ramps on the front of buildings and internal step free access in modern buildings is absolutely wonderful, but unless every metre of a journey from where I am now to where I want to go is accessible then none of it is accessible.
The signal cannot carry.
For example where we used to live it was impossible for me to turn left out of my house at the beginning of any journey, it did not matter how much I tried to reason with thay nine inch high curb just would not smooth out. And that is it, that whole part of my neighbourhood was cut off because the engineers putting in dropped curbs have not seemed to fully grok the reason for dropped curbs.
This kind of mapping is absolutely invaluable and has to be kept in the open source world I think, that does not mean people should not make money from it but this is one of those things where crowdsourcing could really speed up the process considering we are all carrying around incredibly sophisticated geospatial mapping devices containing accelerometers, GPS and all the other bits and bobs needed to quickly map an area.
Hit me up if any of you want to collaborate on a project like this in the UK.
My Aunt is in a wheelchair, and it's notable just how much of the world is cut off. One step renders a building inaccessible. The nearest analog most people get is probably pushing round a pram, but try doing that without lifting the front wheels off the ground.
Unfortunately it's a hard problem to solve. You have many different demands on the streetscape and there's so much legacy infrastructure.
It is also crowd sourced, so coverage varies. Where I am in Bath, there has been a big push to get much of the city mapped (it's a pretty wheelchair-innacessible city), and apparantly it's been quite sucessful. The mapping project is run by the Bath:Hacked group, they have a project page at https://accessiblebath.org/
I'm happy to put you in touch with some of the people involved if you wanted to try and get something like that going where yoou live. I'm sure they'd be happy to help.
I don't know how it is in the UK but I'm not convinced by crowdsourcing in this case, there are so few of us and out of the few how many can be reached and convinced to participate. In most places I've worked or been to I've always been the only handicapped person there and most places I wanted to go to that I checked on wheelmap were not mapped. I feel a solution could be the automatic treatment of aerial photography like you get on google maps' highest zoom settings. It'd be somewhat easy to detect poles in the middle of sidewalks, broken sidewalks, tree roots, etc... and I feel it might be possible to estimate curb height and sidewalk steepness doing some clever processing. So far I'm stuck gathering data, I've found a government website with UK aerial data but was unable to download it and it seemed the coverage was very sparse. Either way I'd be interested in hearing more about your ideas and potentially collaborating even though I'm not in the U.K.
On a related note, I talked briefly with someone who worked in public infrastructure, particularly on "walkability" and he told me to look into Microscale Audit of Pedestrian Streetscapes (MAPS), that might be of interest to you.
The idea was awesome: make the routing algorithm take steps and other impediments into consideration for wheelchair drivers.
I don't know how far they came, but when I read about it I thought that OpenStreetMap is the perfect tool for this.
Would love to evolve this and integrate it into https://wheelmap.org one day!
It's also based on OpenStreetMap, but I am not sure how good the coverage of pavement quality and curb cuts are in diffewrent parts of the world.
For example, my morning commute includes a walk over a sidewalk. At one point there was some construction where I guess some really heavy machinery was sat up on the sidewalks, leaving several of them so cratered that even a regular person could easily twist their ankle because of the severity of the dip in the walkway. Essentially, a perfectly accessible sidewalk is now completely inaccessible due to damage. I don't even know who to contact about this issue, though.
Let’s say construction has begun at a location. The on-street parking at that location has been marked ‘TEMPORARY NO PARKING’ during construction hours. The signs for this are on A-frames, places on the sidewalk.
Depending on the width of the sidewalk, the A-frames may have turned the sidewalk into a wheelchair-unfriendly place. If a delivery drone travels the sidewalk and discovers this, it would be great if that information could automatically be contributed to a place like the Open Street Map!