Towards Personalized Accessible Routing for People with Mobility Impairments

This paper presents a vision for personalized accessible routing for people with mobility impairments and discusses which accessibility information is needed to realize this vision, such as curb cuts, inclination, path width, and additional information about various barriers. In a case study for the city of zurich, the paper first analyses how much of this accessibility information is available and in what quality in OpenStreetMap (OSM), and then investigates different approaches for collecting the missing accessibility data. This accessibility data can be used to implement novel routing apps for pedestrians with mobility impairments and can support city planners in considering future measures to improve urban accessibility. The main questions of this research are: What accessibility information is needed to allow for a personalized accessible routing? How can the missing accessibility data be collected efficiently? We suggest a methodology consisting of a combination of automated, semi-automated, crowd-based, and onsite data collection.