Accessibility in pedestrian routing

Abstract

Pedestrian route planning presents unique challenges compared to relatively well established car routing applications. The challenges are even more pronounced when also considering a diverse user group, which includes people with disabilities. Existing research has identified environmental features that are important to pedestrians with disabilities, but there are still a number of outstanding problems that have hindered the development of a widespread, usable solution. We developed the EUG Access web application (http://geog.uoregon.edu/geocog/ eugaccess) to implement an approach to pedestrian routing that incorporates environmental accessibility and responds to the needs and preferences of a diverse user population. This paper reviews related literature and reports our experience through three phases of development: personalization, route calculation, and interface design. It concludes by drawing attention to issues that we propose are critical to successfully incorporating environmental accessibility into future pedestrian routing applications.