[escapologybb]

This is one of those things that now you've seen it you'll start to notice just how bumpy the world is! I know I didn't give any of this stuff a second thought until quadriplegia meant I became a full-time wheelchair driver.

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.

[ad404b8a372f2b9]

I feel the same way, I've been meaning to do a similar project for France for a long time, a sort of accessibility index for sidewalks that would be added to a weighted sum to give cities an accessibility score. I feel that's where projects like wheelmap fail since they only map buildings.

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.

[noneeeed]

If you're in the UK you might want to check out https://wheelmap.org

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.

[benj111]

Agreed, although I'm not sure I'd echo your thoughts on the engineers.

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.