| Partner | City of Boston |
| Date | Fall 2016 |
| POC | Kris Carter |
Boston is America’s most walkable city; we want to make it the nation’s most accessible.
Right now, too many of our sidewalks are difficult for people to navigate if they use a wheelchair, walker or other mobility aid. Through this project, we want to accomplish two things:
1) Collect and present data that can show optimal routes for people with mobility impairments today. 2) Collect and present data than can help the City identify optimal places for investment to make our sidewalks even better tomorrow.
Our approach for accomplishing these objectives is inspired by some of the early work to develop bicycle routes. First, cyclists shared their preferred routes through the city; then other cyclists learned from those routes, and the City used that data to help prioritize where it striped bike lanes.
We want to do the same thing for accessible routes, exploring crowdsourcing relevant information and presenting that information back to both the public and to city officials.
We know that there are some existing apps that use crowdsourcing to collect information about accessible routes. Look at those apps, see how real they are, if appropriate make connections with the developers to see if there is anything to share or learn.
Collect a small collection of routes that we know are good, which we intend to expand over time as more routes are determined to be suitable. Do this by talking to people at the City of Boston. Consider even a manual approach, using a map and a highlighter. Collect 2 or 3 to establish a baseline of requirements.
Design the schema and backend to store specific accessible routes through the city from starting points to ending points, GPS locations, street by street info about how to cross, the condition of the sidewalk, curb cuts, obstacles, and any other necessary properties. Use the results of the data collection as sample data.
Design a web site and an app to allow citizens to get information about how to get from Point A to Point B, which both shows the user the recommended route, and collects info about their needs of additional routes.
The app can also serve to crowd source routes that are actually taken which then can serve to teach us what new routes we should add to the map.
Develop a way to mine the data to help identify where the City should best invest to make travel through Boston even easier.