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Is there any plan to integrate with or produce your own wheelchair routing, and help with accessibility information for ways as well as points of interest (what WheelMap does right now).

I've moved to a smaller city; and while things are clean and generally well maintained, there are many neglected sections of sidewalks here which would not be accessible to some forms of wheelchair. I do a lot of walking so I am in a good position to gather data like this, but it seems that the effort for this is not as organized.

There are also some non-wheelchair accessibility issues in mapping between new construction and old; for example, textured pavement placed according to new standards, further back from the roadway, but the zebra crossing marks and stop lines were painted according to older standards, closer to the roadway.

I think it would be nice not only to treat this as a repository of useful information for people looking to access these ways, but as a tool to identify, triage, and resolve accessibility issues.

discuss

karussell|5 years ago

For OSM-only data you could set up wheelchair routing with two commands (via GraphHopper) for the region of your choice:

https://github.com/graphhopper/graphhopper#installation

In the config you specify

graph.flag_encoders: wheelchair

and enable elevation:

graph.elevation.provider: srtm

It then considers elevation and many restrictions already but it is probably not as fine tuned as it should be. We would be happy to accept improvements.

microcolonel|5 years ago

I think you need a couple more things than that, like marking excessive cross-slopes, and having a better way to mark mid-way issues. The fields definitely exist, but there's not really a focused method of entering data like this, and it's not clear to me how to do this without messing up the presentation.

holgerd|5 years ago

wheelchair-routing is a difficult, unsolved problem IMHO. Yes you can use a profile in Graphhopper and the Heidelberg University did a large project as well.

When talking with wheelchair users I learnt that they often improvise on the routes they take, for example crossing the road even without curb-cut because it is quicker for them or trash bins blocking the sidewalk.

We plan to integrate a base layer design like https://www.accessmap.io/ which can help with basic orientation (eg. red-colored streets if they have a steep incline for example).

At the same time it would be great to have very detailed data about sidewalks in general. Apart from OSM I think this is an interesting definition: https://sharedstreets.io/