Project Sidewalk: Crowd+AI Tools to Map and Assess Sidewalks
Despite decades of civil rights legislation for Americans with disabilities, many city streets, sidewalks, and businesses remain inaccessible. The problem is not just a lack of accessible sidewalks but also a lack of reliable data on where sidewalks exist and their quality. This lack of data fundamentally limits how sidewalk accessibility can be studied in cities, the ability for communities, advocacy groups, and local governments to understand, transparently discuss, and make informed planning decisions, and how sidewalks and accessibility are incorporated into interactive map, navigation, and GIS analysis tool
In this talk, Prof. Froelich will introduce and describe Project Sidewalk (http://projectsidewalk.org/)—an online tool that combines crowdsourcing, ML, and online imagery to scalably map and assess sidewalk accessibility. Working with local government and NGO partners, Project Sidewalk has been deployed into eight cities, including two in Mexico, with over 550,000 sidewalk labels across 10,000 km of city streets. Through case study vignettes, Prof. Froehlich will describe how Project Sidewalk has been deployed into cities and its impact as well as the development of new analytic and visualization tools such as Sidewalk Gallery (http://sidewalkgallery.io/) and our future plans.