Sidewalk Gallery

Quick Info

Project Date Oct. 1, 2019 - Present
PIs: Jon E. Froehlich (PI)
Sponsors: NSF PacTrans
Keywords: urban informatics, urban accessibility, sidewalks, sidewalk assessment, sidewalk problems, sidewalk images

News

Professor Froehlich Receives PacTrans Outstanding Researcher Award

Oct 14, 2022 | Jon

At the 2022 PacTrans Region 10 Transportation Conference, Professor Froehlich received the PacTrans Outstanding Researcher Award for "outstanding research with significant outcomes, incorporating meaningful student contributions, and robust community service/leadership involvement." Professor Froehlich said "this is really a collective award recognizing the work of PhD students Manaswi Saha, Chu Li, research scientist Michael Saugstad, and our collaborators and partners across the world, including UIC's Institute on Disability and Human Development, WorldEnabled.org, Liga Peatonal, and Gemeente Amsterdam." //end

Spatial Data Science Symposium: Future of Global-Scale Data Collection and Analysis on Urban (in)Accessibility for People with Disabilities

Dec 13, 2021 | Jon

Together with Professor Fabior Miranda from the University of Illinois, Chicago and Maryam Hosseini from Rutgers/NYU, we ran a mini-symposium session on the The Future of Global-Scale Spatial Data Collection and Analyses on Urban (in)Accessibility for People with Disabilities at the 2nd Spatial Data Science Symposium 2021. In our session, we brought together experts in disability, human mobility, urban planning, and computer science to discuss state-of-the-art methods for measuring the quality, condition, and accessibility of urban infrastructure, how these methods may enable new types of geospatial analysis and visualization, and the possibilities for data-driven policy change and accessible urban development. Our overarching goal was to identify open challenges, share current work across disciplines, and spur new collaborations. We had over 50 participants join and a set of lightning talks from Anat Caspi and Nick Bolten from UW, Roberto M. Cesar Jr. and Eric K. Tokuda, from the University of São Paulo, Holger Dieterich and Sebastian Felix Zappe from Sozialhelden, Victor Pineda from the Inclusive Cities Lab and Worldenabled.org, Yochai Eisenberg from the University of Illinois, Chicago, and Andres Sevtsuk from UW. Froehlich, J. E., Miranda, F., Hosseini, M., Bolten, N., Caspi, A., Cesar Jr., R. M., Dieterich, H., Eisenberg, Y., Pineda, V., Saha, M., Saugstad, M., Sevtsuk, A., Silva, C. T., Tokuda, E. K., Zappe, S. F. (2021). The Future of Global-Scale Spatial Data Collection and Analyses on Urban (in)Accessibility for People with Disabilities. Spatial Data Science Symposium 2021.

About

Sidewalk Gallery

A 1-min video overview of Sidewalk Gallery

What do sidewalk accessibility problems look like? How might these problems differ across cities? In this poster paper, we introduce Sidewalk Gallery, an interactive, filterable gallery of over 500,000 crowdsourced sidewalk accessibility images (and growing!) across seven cities in two countries (US and Mexico). Gallery allows users to explore and interactively filter sidewalk images based on five primary accessibility problem types, 35 tag categories, and a 5-point severity scale. When browsing images, users can also provide feedback about data correctness. We envision Gallery as a tool for teaching in urban design and accessibility and as a visualization aid for disability advocacy.