[Accessibility] Introduction to the list

[Ed Hillsman]

Hi,

I'm Ed, 59, doing transportation research and development at the  
Center for Urban Transportation Research at the University of South  
Florida in Tampa. I've subscribed to this list from my home address.

I got involved with OSM in February and have been interested in its  
potential to help promote the use of walking, cycling, and transit.  
Amazingly, our university does not have a map for general distribution  
that shows sidewalks and crosswalks. I was impressed with the  
University of Maryland student project that developed a walk-trip  
planner on an OSM base, at http://map.umd.edu/, and one of my  
colleagues and I want to develop one here as part of our interest in  
sustainability. Our office of disability services is also interested,  
and we are looking at how to enter data to support the needs of  
disabled users as well as to favor the generation of routes that  
pedestrians will find appealing in our car-centric campus and  
surroundings. We probably will need to clarify the use of some tags,  
and create some additional tags, to do this. For example, we know that  
unless vehicle speed on a street is very low (30 kph), pedestrians  
feel safer if there is a planting strip or parkway to act as a  
psychological buffer between the sidewalk and the street than if there  
is not; the present tagging system does not seem to represent this  
space. We will need to clarify how to represent pedestrian crossings  
of streets, which the Maryland example seems to have paid little  
attention to (for example, although they coded stairs, I do not find  
anything in their campus data on curb cuts or on inclines, which with  
the extent of stairways on the campus should be of importance). I have  
friends who can ascend shallow stair inclines but not steep ones, so  
we would like to code inclines for stairs as well as sidewalks. And we  
will need to decide how to integrate the treatment of sidewalks with  
parking lots, which occupy a lot of space on our commuter campus and  
which often serve as de facto pedestrian ways as students take short- 
cuts across them; some sidewalks run along the perimeter of the  
parking lot rather than originating or ending at the lot, and some of  
the bounding sidewalks have no curbs because the parking spaces  
immediately adjacent to them are reserved for drivers with disabilities.

You won't find any evidence of this on the map for our campus yet.  
We've purposely asked students interested in OSM to hold off working  
with the campus until we get a student project going to upload a file  
of campus infrastructure that they can then field check and clean up.  
So the few features coded on the campus came from people learning how  
to use GPS for mapping, or how to use Potlatch.

We also have preliminary approval for a project this fall to develop a  
prototype multimodal trip planner (bike to bus to walk), using OSM as  
the data platform. We are still awaiting final approval before we can  
begin, so what we do now is on our own time. Once the project starts,  
I imagine that my colleague will subscribe to the list as well. He has  
worked with location-aware services for developmentally-disabled bus  
riders (using a cell phone to prompt riders when to request a stop and  
when to get off the bus). We plan to draw heavily on his experience  
and computer-science expertise in this project and the campus routing  
service. My role is more in the geography and the human/social  
interaction with the built environment.

I would welcome hearing from and working with others who have similar  
interests.

Ed

Edward L. Hillsman, Ph.D.
Senior Research Associate
Center for Urban Transportation Research
University of South Florida
4202 Fowler Ave., CUT100
Tampa, FL  33620-5375
813-974-2977 (tel)
813-974-5168 (fax)
hillsman at cutr.usf.edu (work)
ehillsman at tampabay.rr.com (home)