Seattle can be a difficult to navigate, but a new project from the University of Washington aims to remedy that.
AccessMap, spearheaded by the Taskar Center for Accessible Technology, has always allowed for people to pick more accessible or pedestrian-friendly routes on their own. But last week they launched a new online travel planner, which offers customizable suggestions for getting around the city.
Users can now type in a start point and destination, and receive automated route ideas for how to best avoid construction, hills of a certain grade, or routes unfriendly to pedestrians.
“The big highlight now is our ability to offer automated routing and accessible travel planning for Seattle residents who may have mobility challenges or may simply want to find the easiest way to navigate a neighborhood with a toddler on a tricycle,” Taskar Center director Anat Caspi told UW News. “Identifying routes that optimize not for time or distance but for things like changes in elevation and curb cuts is a really big and important change.”
The program was built by compiling and cleaning up data from local and federal sources on accessibility features like street elevation and curb cuts. Though the data could obviously be useful for people in wheelchairs or with certain injuries and health conditions that make walking up steep hills a chore, the Taskar team also hopes the AccessMap will help delivery drivers who push hand trucks, travelers hauling luggage, or even bikers and roller skaters.
They’ve also partnered with the Seattle Public Schools and City of Seattle on the Safe Route to School initiative, which is working on increasing the number of kids walking and biking to school.
Coupled with the recent OpenStreetMap tool, which crowdsources up-to-date maps of street conditions, the center aims to make accessibility easy for users to navigate.
“We hope to be able to crowdsource all kinds of information that relates to accessibility: where a sidewalk may be cracked or buckled because of a tree root, other obstacles, inclines, lighting, how smooth the surface is, whether there’s tactile paving,” Nick Bolten, a UW electrical engineering doctoral student and project technical lead for AccessMap and OpenSidewalks, said to UW News.
Now that the Taskar Center has launched the routing project in Seattle, they hope to expand to other urban markets, like New York, Washington D.C., and Chicago.
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