But government data — and possibly crowdsourcing — might be able to help make those trips a little easier. In Seattle, one organization has put together a service called AccessMap that aims to provide routing around the hill-laden city for people with disabilities. The service uses data sets from several sources, including the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) and the U.S. Geological Survey, to show where bus lines are, where ramped curbs exist, which streets have steep grades and more.
The service is still young. According to an article from NextCity, the project won a civic hackathon event in March last year and is still struggling to find complete data sources. The locations of ramped curbs, for example, was sometimes inaccurately marked in SDOT data. Another issue is sidewalk construction projects, which can be difficult to keep track of.
That last issue is the kind of thing the city of Los Angeles has aimed to address with the January launch of a massive mapping portal called GeoHub. The city noted that the map will allow users to plot out the timing and location of construction projects alongside many other types of data.
For other hard-to-track issues such as buckling sidewalks, AccessMap is looking to add crowdsourced data into the mix. That might come from Open Street Maps, which allows users to report geo-tagged information.
And Seattle isn’t the last stop for the service, either. According to NextCity, the map’s creators are working to expand AccessMap to Denver and Savannah, Ga.