![]() We could study the accessibility of urban rail transit systems between cities, countries and even continents. The data that we're collecting here is invaluable. We're working on those suggestions.ĪS: Yes! First, we're expanding to other cities, and Tokyo is next on our list. In our study, people suggested creating an app for the system and adding route-planning features. Of course, there's room to grow and features to implement. They loved that we finally had something that had a central focus on accessibility. What were their reactions?ĪS: People loved it. These participants interacted with UnlockedMaps in their metro area for at least 20 minutes. With UnlockedMaps, all that information is right there!įor your study, you recruited 34 participants who identified as being a member of the following groups: people with mobility disabilities, pregnant people, cyclists/stroller users/commuters with heavy equipment, members of disability advocacy groups and civic hackers. You have to individually click on each restaurant and check if it's accessible or not, using Google Maps. But no other maps really let you filter those out by accessibility. Why?ĪS: I think restaurants and restrooms are two of the most common things that people look for when they plan their commute. ![]() UnlockedMaps also contains information about nearby restaurants and restrooms. And that, in my experience, is a painfully slow process. To make them accessible, the local city government would need to work with the transit authorities to perform necessary construction of ramps or installation of elevators. This means there's either no elevator or ramp present for people who use wheelchairs to access the platform. What does it mean for a station to be "not accessible" compared to having an elevator outage?ĪS: Most stations unfortunately are not accessible. We're working on increasing our computing resources to fetch the data even more frequently. I am excited to onboard more cities, and the work for that has already begun.ĪS: We scrape the websites of transit authorities and get elevator outage updates hourly. The other three became part of the project because developers from those cities reached out and wanted to contribute to give back to their communities. It was a way to give back to the community. UnlockPhilly is, unfortunately, no longer an active project, but it inspired us to build UnlockedMaps that targets six different metro areas and is an active research project for us.ĪS: I have lived in Philadelphia, Chicago and Seattle, so those were no-brainers. It was the same idea, except that it was limited only to Philadelphia. How did you get started with UnlockedMaps?ĪS: In 2014, a good friend and I developed a tool called UnlockPhilly at a hackathon. The data can be used by developers, disability advocates and policymakers for a variety of purposes, including shedding light on the frequency of elevator outages and their repair times to identify the disparities between neighborhoods in a given city. We've been recording elevator outages for the past 28 months in these metro areas. Second, the history of elevator outages is not available anywhere. ![]() So, these commuters usually just show up at stations, find that the elevators aren't functioning and then have to find alternative ways to commute, which can lead to missing important appointments or even having to cancel them. What was the inspiration behind UnlockedMaps?Īther Sharif: First, people who rely on elevators, such as people who use wheelchairs, currently have no map-based tools available to know if there is a real-time elevator outage at a given station. ![]() Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, to share the details. UW News asked lead author Ather Sharif, a UW doctoral student in the Paul G. 24 at the ASSETS 2022 Conference on Computers and Accessibility. The researchers will present these findings Oct. The team collected elevator outage data from more than 2,300 transit stations over the past two years to build the system. UnlockedMaps shows which stations are accessible and which ones are experiencing elevator outages. Researchers at the University of Washington developed UnlockedMaps, a web-based map that allows users to see in real time how accessible rail transit stations are in six metro areas: Philadelphia, Chicago, Seattle, Toronto, New York and the California Bay Area.
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