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Welcome to Project Sidewalk! Project Sidewalk is an open source project aimed at mapping and assessing every sidewalk in the world using remote crowdsourcing, artificial intelligence, and online satellite & streetscape imagery.
We are now in 23 cities across 8 countries including the US, Canada, Mexico, Ecuador, Netherlands, Switzerland, and New Zealand (with more to come) and natively translated into five languages, including English, Spanish, German, Mandarin, and Dutch. Our online users have collected over 1.8 million data points.
Are you interested in deploying Project Sidewalk into your city? Please begin by reading Considerations when Preparing for and Deploying to New Cities. You can see a live dashboard of Project Sidewalk deployments here.
For a successful deployment, we have found it best to work closely with strong, engaged local partner(s)—for example, walkability or disability advocacy groups and/or the local government. Please see our primary deployment considerations here. Some example deployments and partners include:
- In Newberg, Oregon, we worked directly with local disability advocates and the city government
- In Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada, we work with Gerontology Professor Atiya Mahmood at Simon Fraser University along with the city of Burnaby.
- In San Pedro Mexico, we worked with a Mexico-based NGO called Liga Peatonal and the local government
- In Amsterdam, we worked with the local government and the disability rights organization World Enabled
- In Oradell, New Jersey, we worked with local Girl Scout troops, the local MS society, and the local hospital and medical school (Hackensack University Medical Center).
- In Taipei, Taiwan, we worked with a local pedestrian rights group called People Nudge
Project Sidewalk is deployed all over the world. Each sidewalk and city is different and there are different standards and design guidelines for safety and accessibility. Thus, we encourage you to create your own custom training materials, as necessary. You can use our materials as a base and customize them how you like. For example, here are the training materials created by the City of Amsterdam.
Here are the traing materials we have used successfully in some US-based deployments:
- Project Sidewalk Training Deck. An overview of Project Sidewalk with interactive activities (~15 mins)
- Project Sidewalk Walla Walla, WA Training Deck. The training materials for Walla Walla, WA.
- Project Sidewalk DOs and DONTs. A collection of common mistakes and tips
- Example Project Sidewalk Mapathon Deck. This is an example Project Sidewalk mapathon deck with motivation, example deployments, and an overview of the tool
- Example Presentation of Project Sidewalk Data Analysis and Findings. An example presentation of how Project Sidewalk data can be used to analyze sidewalk accessibility barriers and features in a city (in this case, Oradell, New Jersey).
- Pre and post activities. We have example pre-activity and post-activity worksheets, which are useful to drive discussion and evaluate pre- and post-learning.
The initial idea and experiments were funded in 2012 by a Google Faculty Research Award and NSF Award #1302338, which was led by Professor Jon E. Froehlich and his PhD student Kotaro Hara. The first Project Sidewalk deployment took place in ~2017 in Washington DC (see CHI'19 Best Paper), which was co-led by PhD student Manaswi Saha and research scientist Mikey Saugstad. Since then, Project Sidewalk has been deployed in over 15 cities across seven countries, including the US, Mexico, Ecuador, Netherlands, Switzerland, and New Zealand—with invaluable code and design contributions from 70+ high school, undergrad, and graduate students and countless organizations, including World Enabled, Easterseals, and Liga Peatonal.
Project Sidewalk and related research is currently supported by NSF Award #2125087 with Professor Yochai Eisenberg and colleagues at the University of Illinois Chicago and NSF Award #2236277 with Professor Brent Chamberlain and colleagues at Utah State University.
To contribute code, follow these steps:
- Set up your dev environment by following the instructions in the README.
- Pick an issue to work on, then follow our instructions for contributing new code.
Otherwise, you can click on the pages to the right of this text area to get started (under the 'Pages' menu).