Citizen Participation & Digital Tools to Improve Pedestrian Mobility in Cities (original) (raw)
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Urban sidewalks: visualization and routing for individuals with limited mobility
arXiv (Cornell University), 2016
People with limited mobility in the U.S. (defined as having difficulty or inability to walk a quarter of a mile without help and without the use of special equipment) face a growing informational gap: while pedestrian routing algorithms are getting faster and more informative, planning a route with a wheeled device in urban centers is very difficult due to lack of integrated pertinent information regarding accessibility along the route. Moreover, reducing access to street-spaces translates to reduced access to other public information and services that are increasingly made available to the public along urban streets. To adequately plan a commute, a traveler with limited or wheeled mobility must know whether her path may be blocked by construction, whether the sidewalk would be too steep or rendered unusable due to poor conditions, whether the street can be crossed or a highway is blocking the way, or whether there is a sidewalk at all. These details populate different datasets in many modern municipalities, but they are not immediately available in a convenient, integrated format to be useful to people with limited mobility. Our project, AccessMap, in its first phase (v.1) overlayed the information that is most relevant to people with limited mobility on a map, enabling self-planning of routes. Here, we describe the next phase of the project: synthesizing commonly available open data (including streets, sidewalks, curb ramps, elevation data, and construction permit information) to generate a graph of paths to enable variable cost-function accessible routing.
A pedestrian-centered approach for equitable access to built environments
Equitable pedestrian access is crucial for a barrier-free city, where people with different abilities can independently access streets and services using current and relevant routing information. Pedestrians present heterogeneous information requirements about the urban street environment, consisting of both static and transient information. Similarly, governmental stakeholders such as municipalities, transportation agencies, and city planners require an accurate base layer representing the built environment, and additional static/transient data types. However, such data are generally unavailable in a user-consumable format, which leads to several challenges in developing pedestrian-facing applications. In this paper, we describe these challenges in the context of developing a customizable routing solution for pedestrians with disabilities. Because existing routing solutions primarily optimize for short street distances and are unaware of barriers such as steep inclines, a pedestrian-centric trip planning solution is essential. As part of this case study, we demonstrate that a data model for equitable pedestrian wayfinding must flexibly support an annotated pedestrian network in an open, shared spatio-temporal data commons that can adequately support the data provenance needs of all stakeholders. Finally, we generalize our experience to a model of a community-mediated data commons that can contribute to a better functioning of the public sector.
A pedestrian-centered data approach for equitable access to urban infrastructure environments
Crucial for a barrier-free city, equitable pedestrian access allows people with different abilities to independently access streets and services using relevant information. Pedestrians require both static and transient information regarding the street environment. Government stakeholders—such as municipalities, transportation agencies, and city planners—require accurate descriptions of the urban pedestrian environment to equitably carry out their mandates. However, pedestrian-centric data are generally unavailable in a standardized format, making it challenging to maintain and disseminate relevant information. In this paper, we describe these challenges in the context of AccessMap, a customizable routing solution for pedestrians with limited mobility. Because existing routing solutions do not account for most barriers to accessibility, the information needs of these users are largely unmet. Using AccessMap as a case study, we demonstrate that a data model for equitable access to pedestrian information should: (1) include an annotated pedestrian transportation network, (2) be openly accessible, and (3) allow for the selective sharing of information to address the needs of all stakeholders. Finally, we generalize our experience to showcase a model of a community-mediated data commons that can contribute to better public sector functioning.
Buildings
Half the world’s population now lives in cities, and this figure is expected to reach 70% by 2050. To ensure future cities offer equity for multiple age groups, it is important to plan for spatially inclusive features such as pedestrian accessibility. This feature is strongly related to many emerging global challenges regarding health, an ageing population, and an inclusive society, and should be carefully considered when designing future cities to meet the mobility requirements of different groups of people, reduce reliance on cars, and encourage greater participation by all residents. Independent travel to public open spaces, particularly green spaces, is widely considered a key factor that affects human health and well-being and is considered a primary motivation for walking. At the same time, unfavourable steepness and restrictive access points to open spaces can limit accessibility and restrict the activities of older adults or people with mobility impairments. This paper intro...
Barriers Survey: A Tool to Support Data Collection for Inclusive Mobility
In this paper we describe the potential for using the Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI), and large crowd-sourced survey, in disable people mobility computing applications The challenge is to make these two concepts talking together exploiting the technologies in order to increase the public participation, and to move towards sustainable development. Our goal is to investigate how participative and peoplecentric data collection can be used to create a low-cost, open platform to survey, annotate and localise pedestrian mobility features and architectural barriers as it is perceived by the citizen themselves. The core of the project consists into the development and deployment of a mobile application and a web platform, which allow the users to collect and manage the information surveyed. . . .
Mapping Accessible Paths in the City Using Collective Intelligence
Proceedings of the 52nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2019
New information and communication technologies (ICTs) have an increasingly stronger role in people's lives, especially after the commoditization of smartphones. They affect many aspects of everyday life, including urban mobility. Some applications, including Waze, benefit from the collective intelligence (CI) of the crowds to gather the information they need to provide users with good advice on the routes to follow. But they are mainly focused on roads and streets, giving little information on the quality of sidewalks, which are essential to pedestrians, people on wheelchairs and blind people. With the intention to improve the mobility of citizens with special needs, we developed the prototype of an application that allows users themselves to update accessibility maps, tagging obstacles and also indicating the existence of resources that contribute to improve the mobility of people with special needs in urban spaces. Tests in a controlled environment helped to debug the application's functionalities, before members of the intended target group of users were finally exposed to it. Results are promising, as users were able to include relevant data by themselves and seem motivated to keep doing so, due a sense of utility, social facilitation or simply due to altruism, as anticipated by the CI literature. One unexpected outcome was that impaired users are more excited about the potential the application has to give visibility to the challenges they face than with the actual improvement it can bring to their mobility.
Webwalk: using GIS mapping to compute door-to-door routes on a web platform
This work presents a GIS tool on a web interface that allows the user to calculate door-to-door walking routes to work or his favourite leisure and shopping places, indeed any place he or she wants to go within the city, according to several criteria (time-budget, effort, aesthetics, etc.). The tool is being developed for Geneva, though ideally each city should be able to adopt this instrument to allow its citizens an easy and reliable way to compare diverse walking routes and show that walking can be a competitive modal choice for most short routes within the city. This web interface is an expression of the complex relationships between users' walking representations that influence walking patterns and the built environment factors that encourage or discourage users to adopt existing pedestrian routes and integrate them in their daily displacements. The added value of the customised solution this web platform provides is empowerment: it allows users to interactive ly create th...
A System for Generating Customized Pleasant Pedestrian Routes Based on OpenStreetMap Data
Sensors, 2018
In this work, we present a system that generates customized pedestrian routes entirely based on data from OpenStreetMap (OSM). The system enables users to define to what extent they would like the route to have green areas (e.g., parks, squares, trees), social places (e.g., cafes, restaurants, shops) and quieter streets (i.e., with less road traffic). We present how the greenness, sociability, and quietness factors are defined and extracted from OSM as well as how they are integrated into a routing cost function. We intrinsically evaluate customized routes from one-thousand trips, i.e., origin–destination pairs, and observe that these are, in general, as we intended—slightly longer but significantly more social, greener, and quieter than the respective shortest routes. Based on a survey taken by 156 individuals, we also evaluate the system’s usefulness, usability, controlability, and transparency. The majority of the survey participants agree that the system is useful and easy to us...
Alternate Pedestrian Routes in the Cities
2017
In 2014 the UN World Urbanization Prospects The Revision report has presented that 54% of the world’s population has lived in cities. And accorting to the forecast made in the report in 2050, this rate will be 66%. So the cities of the future will have to face significant demographic and sociological problems because besides moving into the city various ethnic and religious groups according to the characteristic of the western countries the urban population shows an aging trend. And in addition the increasing number of the disabled people whose mobility even in a crowded city must be ensured. Therefore the public spaces will play an even more significant role in the cities life because this is the “space” in every city where regardless of gender, age, religion, qualification, etc. all social classes can be found. This is especially true for the public squares and parks where people can not only meet with each other from the different social groups but they can dialogue with each oth...
Planning and Designing Walkable Cities: A Smart Approach
Smart Planning: Sustainability and Mobility in the Age of Change
Walking may be considered one of the most sustainable and democratic ways of travelling within a city, thus providing benefits not only to pedestrians but also to the urban environment. Beside, walking is also one of the means of transport most likely subjected to factors outside an individual's control, like social or physical abilities to walk and the presence of comfortable and safe street infrastructures and services. Therefore improving urban conditions provided to pedestrians has positive impacts on walkability. At the same time technological solutions and innovations have the power to encourage and support people to walk by overcoming immaterial barriers due to a lack of information or boring travel and to gain data to understand how and where people travel. Merging these two dimension into a unique approach can drastically improve accessibility, attractiveness, safety, comfort and security of urban spaces. In this context, this paper aims to draw a more multifaceted context for walkability, where new technologies assume a key role for introducing new approaches to pedestrian paths planning and design and thus for enhancing this mode of transport. Indeed, by combining more traditional spatial-based and perceptual analysis of the urban environment with technological applications and social media exploitation there will be room to better support the decision on and to enhance satisfaction of walking as well as to easier plan and design more walkable cities.