https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1030-5903
Because community participation enriches the lives of people of all ages and abilities, eliminating obstacles to accessibility needs to be a priority for all communities. In many communities, deficiencies in the built environment, including roads, streets, parking lots, and buildings, prevent people with disabilities from achieving their optimal quality of life. (Citation1–3)
Major urban planning initiatives, national and international, have addressed the need to improve accessibility to ensure the participation of diverse members of the community, including the elderly and people with disabilities. (Citation4–7) Their recommendations for the built environment emphasize the importance of sidewalk accessibility to community participation.
As essential conduits, sidewalks are integral to the ability to access the range of community services, including shopping, employment, education, health care, social and recreational activities, and transportation. To ensure safe access to sidewalks and streets, in 2023, the US Access Board, in accordance with the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Architectural Barriers Act, published new public right-of-way guidelines that apply to existing pedestrian facilities as well as new construction covered by previous federal legislation. (Citation8)
However, despite long-term, broad-based policy support for improvements, in many communities, sidewalk conditions remain a barrier to safe and independent access for residents, workers, and visitors, including people with disabilities. (Citation9–12) Ableism, delays in implementation, and lack of enforcement contribute to unacceptably slow progress. An open-data approach rooted in citizen science may provide the impetus to jumpstart much needed improvements.
Started in 2012, Project Sidewalk® a Google-Street-View®-based custom assessment tool, enlists community volunteers to gather crowd-sourced data on sidewalk conditions. (Citation12) Volunteers access the project on scistarter.org, an online hub for citizen science projects, and train and work remotely, using Google-Street-View’s virtual panoramic imagery. To date, Project Sidewalk has been deployed in 20 cities across eight countries, including the US, Canada, Mexico, Ecuador, and Netherlands with native language support in English, German, Spanish, Mandarin, and Dutch. In total, Project Sidewalk users have contributed more than 932,000 geo-located labels detailing type and severity of surface irregularities, obstacles, missing sidewalks, and missing and inadequate curb ramps.
Actionable data that identify, quantify, and validate these problems is essential to motivating local government to prioritize sidewalk repair and maintenance, as well as for influencing best practices for urban design and planning, according to Jon Froehlich, PhD, founder of Project Sidewalk, and professor in Human-Computer Interaction at the University of Washington’s Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering. Dr. Froehlich sees the potential for mapping sidewalk networks like Google Maps’ streets and roads. “We need to prioritize non-motorized travel,” he said, “and apply this technology to provide guidance for accessible routes for pedestrians and wheelchair users.” (Citation13)
A recent contributor to Project Sidewalk was Oradell, a borough with more than 8,000 residents in Bergen County, New Jersey. A team of trained local volunteers, including girl scouts, members of the New Jersey Metro Chapter of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, and faculty and students from the Department of Neurology at Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine (including this journal’s editor), examined 36 miles of streets, and submitted more than 11,000 labels of sidewalk characteristics. (Citation14)
Michael I. Starr, MBA, a New Jersey Metro Chapter board member who became a wheelchair user in 2020, shared his experiences with mapping the sidewalks of Oradell. “For 54 years, I took my ability to get around town for granted,” he explained. “Mapping my town’s sidewalks raised awareness of the obstacles that people with disabilities, including wheelchair users, encounter daily.”
As a result of Project Sidewalk, Oradell passed an ordinance requiring homeowners to repair their sidewalks before selling their homes. The town is also considering ways to offset the cost of sidewalk repairs through tax incentives and arrangements with contractors. Achieving further success depends upon the power of citizen science. “We need more partners, more volunteers. and more data,” said Dr. Froehlich.
The long-term goal is to use Project Sidewalk’s growing dataset to train computer vision and machine-learning algorithms to detect accessibility problems automatically. “Collecting accessibility data is expensive for cities and time-consuming for volunteers,” Dr. Froehlich acknowledged. “If data collection is automated, it will help free up budget money needed to repair and maintain sidewalks.”
Visit https://accessiblecommunities.org/ to learn more.
References
- Botticello AL, Rohrbach T, Cobbold N. Disability and the built environment: an investigation of community and neighborhood land uses and participation for physically impaired adults. Ann Epidemiol 2014 Jul;24(7):545–50. doi:10.1016/j.annepidem.2014.05.003. Epub 2014 May 10.
- Heeb Desai R, Hamlin E, Eyler A, Putnam M, Stark S, Morgan K. Identifying built environment factors influencing the community participation of adults aging with long-term physical disabilities: a qualitative study. Disability & Society 2023; doi:10.1080/09687599.2023.2233683.
- Silveira SL, Motl RW. Environmental correlates of health-promoting leisure physical activity in persons with multiple sclerosis using a social cognitive perspective embedded within social ecological model. Prev Med Rep 2019 Jun 18;15:100921, doi:10.1016/j.pmedr.2019.100921.
- United Nations. Convention on the rights of persons with disabilities. Article 9, Accessibility. 2006 Dec 12. https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/convention-rights-persons-disabilities.
- United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. (2015). Sustainable development goal 11. Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable. https://sdgs.un.org/goals/goal11.
- World Health Organization. World Bank. World Report on Disability 2011. https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789241564182.
- National Academy of Sciences. National cooperative highway research program (NCHRP) project 20-7 (232). ADA transition plans. A guide to best management practices. May 2009. https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/indiv/docs/ada_transition_plans_report.pdf.
- US Access Board. U.S. Access Board issues final rule on public right-of-way accessibility guidelines. Aug 8, 2023. https://www.access-board.gov/news/2023/08/08/u-s-access-board-issues-final-rule-on-public-right-of-way-accessibility-guidelines/.
- Choi N, Basat G. Accessible sidewalks for inclusive cities. World Bank blog/sustainable cities. April 13, 2022. https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/sustainablecities/accessible-sidewalks-inclusive-cities.
- O’Hagan M. Reluctant cities, towns, and states are being dragged into court to fix sidewalks for people with disabilities. Time. Oct 12, 2021. https://time.com/6105909/sidewalk-accessibility-lawsuits/.
- Hu W. For the disabled, New York’s sidewalks are an obstacle course. The New York Times 2017 www.nytimes.com/2017/10/08/nyregion/new-york-city-sidewalks-disabled-curb-ramps.html.
- Kode A. Fixing Central Park’s bumpy sidewalks. New York Times. March 15, 2024. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/15/realestate/central-park-sidewalk-restoration.html.
- Project Sidewalk. Accessed Mar 24, 2024. https://scistarter.org/project-sidewalk.
- Fujii K, Ma K, Li C, Saugstad M, Stolarz L, Starr M, Thomas FP, Froehlich J. Implementing a community-based virtual tool to characterize sidewalk accessibility in a Northern New Jersey (NJ) town. Abstract. J Spinal Cord Med 2023;45(6):991.