Leveraging OpenStreetMap for Pedestrian Experience Modeling and Analysis

The experience of pedestrians and wheelchairs users is different from the experience of motorists, transit riders, and bicyclists. The pedestrian experience depends on the conditions of sidewalks, curb ramps, and other features that are frequently missing from maps. Analysis for urban planners and individualized services for pedestrians require an accurate and detailed walkway network model.

OSM is an optimal foundation for walkway modeling: it has rich detail about pedestrian routes, data updates and corrections are easy, and open data facilitates citizen and advocacy group involvement. We’re building a full stack of open source tools which leverage OSM for walkability analysis. Functionality will include: acquisition and correlation of additional data relevant to the pedestrian experience, walkway network generation, routing, route-based walkability analysis, and results presentation. We plan to make these tools available as Python QGIS plugins.

Potential uses include impact analysis for improvements to infrastructure and placement of parks, grocery stores, and schools, the elucidation of improvement proposals via interactive websites allowing citizens to examine the impacts for themselves, and real-time individualized web services.

The GIS Jammers group is supported by Oregon Walks and Portland State University. Our goal is to better understand where we walk and to empower activists.