When Washington state asked which residents had access to frequent transit, it ran into a surprisingly basic problem: that question is hard to answer without knowing where sidewalks, crossings and curb ramps actually are. Dr. Anat Caspi, director of the Taskar Center for Accessible Technology at the University of Washington, joins the show to talk about Open Sidewalks, a project that helps communities map pedestrian infrastructure in a shared, usable format. Her team has mapped hundreds of thousands of sidewalks, and now residents can help add the local details that determine whether a route actually works in daily life.
Hello, and welcome to Bottom Up Shorts. I'm Norm, with Strong Towns. I'm delighted to be able to connect with a broad array of people who are working zealously to make their community stronger and more suitable for a broader range of people to fully participate with dignity and opportunity within our community spaces.
Together, as stewards of our places, we know that one of the challenges we face in our cities is not necessarily building new stuff — it's actually about maintaining what we already have. But what happens when the infrastructure you're responsible for doesn't even exist in your records?
Today's guest is Dr. Anat Caspi, Director of the Taskar Center for Accessible Technology at the University of Washington. Her work focuses on a surprisingly basic problem with big consequences: many of our transportation agencies don't have reliable data about their pedestrian networks. Sidewalks, pathways, curb ramps, and other critical pieces of infrastructure are often effectively invisible in the systems used to manage and maintain them.
Today we're going to talk about why pedestrian infrastructure gets overlooked, what it takes to build a more comprehensive inventory of our sidewalks — even at a statewide scale — and how communities can help our agencies make better maintenance decisions. This checks so many boxes on the Strong Towns radar. Welcome, Dr. Caspi. Glad to have you aboard.
Thank you so much for having me.
I want to dive right in — can you share about the Open Sidewalks project, and this whole effort to bring out into the open what is easy to ignore or overlook?
Yes, I'd love to. As you mentioned, every city has a street network that it manages, but most cities don't yet have an actual usable public map of their assets to answer very simple questions about whether people can actually move through that network — on foot, with wheelchairs, with strollers, with a cane or walker, biking, or getting to transit.
The Open Sidewalks project was really about trying to make that missing civic layer visible: shared, open data that is actionable by both residents and planners. Open Sidewalks started out as just defining a shared language that would allow pedestrians and residents to communicate effectively with the people operating these spaces.
Over the past ten years, we've grown from defining that shared language to a whole tooling ecosystem that helps close the gap between telling a story about a barrier you hit in the public right of way, and translating that into operational information that a planner — or someone making decisions about where resources should go — can actually use. So this is really all about local agency, which is what you were talking about.
That's fantastic. I'd love to know what people are able to do with the OS Connect map and some of the tools that are available — what technical requirements might people face, and how can they help?
Where we started was trying to provide better measurements for the people actually trying to manage the infrastructure. This goes back to the old adage: if you can't measure it, you can't manage it. In 2021, the state of Washington asked a simple question: which Washingtonians have access to frequent transit? That's something every jurisdiction managing these assets should be able to answer. But without information about where the sidewalks are, how they connect, and how people can traverse that environment, you can't give an accurate assessment of who has access to frequent transit.
When the state asked that question, consultants got together — a large collaborative of a whole bunch of organizations — to provide an answer, with this caveat: you can't actually answer this question unless you assess and collect all of the sidewalks and crossings in your state using one open-source, consistent, standardized set of information. That's how my team was awarded the lead on this legislative proviso, and of course there was a lot of grassroots activity that led up to it. So, again, to your listeners: it is possible for grassroots organizing to move a state to do something this momentous.
Once we had that mandate, it took us about 18 months to collect a basic layer of information: where the sidewalks are, how they're connected, whether they connect to crossings, and whether those connections are curb-ramped or not — plus information about the incline and width of these pathways. Things that require on-the-ground assessment weren't something we could provide in this first breadth-first pass; the goal was to do as much as we could. The scale of this is really unprecedented — we have over 593,000 sidewalks in the state of Washington. We wouldn't have been able to collect all of this without the help of AI, but we also built tooling that allows manual vetting of the information, so every single piece of data is manually checked, just very quickly, because our tooling lets human eyes look at it, assess whether it's correct, and move on. In the span of 23 months, we did that work, and the state now has a statewide, open, shared data set for all of Washington.
So, to your question — what can people do now? Our hopes are basically threefold. First, I shared a link: you can go to that asset, look around, and zoom into your own jurisdiction. You can also find a quality assessment report, which is really important — that assessment isn't just for the jurisdiction, it's available to every resident who wants to understand how many sidewalks are in their area and what the overall quality of the data is. It also shows potential bottlenecks — places where people are going to want to travel because they're close to points of interest.
We did this whole assessment so people can identify where the points of service are — grocery stores, transit links, schools, parks, recreational areas — and figure out how people would best want to connect to those places, and whether the network actually supports that kind of travel. You might want to zoom in on a potential bottleneck, because these are areas that should carry people along routes between different services but currently don't allow for good pedestrian access. That's essentially what you're able to do with the OS Connect viewer.
If you want to go further, we offer a whole bunch of tooling — we also have these fun team-challenge capabilities through a mobile app. Whether you're a single citizen, a student in a high school, or someone organizing a fundraiser, we get together and create launchable quests. They're gamified, we have leaderboards, and we let people enhance the information on that very basic network I described with additional, locally focused information.
Everybody gets to identify what informational points they want added. Do we want to know about accessible pedestrian signals? We'll put that in the quest. Do we want to know about surface disruptions — where the sidewalks are in bad shape? We'll put that question in the quest. So the quests are very flexible; the whole point is to make it locally focused, so people can address the priorities they actually have, rather than something handed down from above.
People aren't asked to provide ADA compliance assessments — that's not the typical focus. What you really want is to be able to say: this experience is noisy, it's crowded, the surface is bad. Those kinds of lived experiences are what we're trying to connect — going back to the first thing we talked about — the stories and lived experience with the asset-management side of things. So when that quest information is delivered to the people operating and managing these environments, they have a very specific, detailed set of information: oh, this sidewalk is tied to that specific experience or story.
It seems to me that there are two sorts of pathways. One is people who are able to use the app because their state — maybe they're in Washington or elsewhere — is connected into your system. Then there's probably a subset of people for whom the mapping tool isn't completed yet for their community, but they can still do some of this as citizen projects.
Could you share which states this is currently functioning in? And secondarily, if someone doesn't yet have that, what are some good practices they can follow if they're mapping their own community's sidewalks, so it would be ready for a pretty seamless integration into a tool like what you're describing?
Perfect, I love that you asked this question. Actually, every community is able to do this — just let us know. Right now we have three states fully enabled: Oregon, Maryland, and Washington, with California very soon since they just signed on, which is awesome.
Influencing your local jurisdiction to sign on is probably the best-stewarded approach, because they'll be more motivated to maintain it. However, everybody can use either our system or OpenStreetMap to map that basic line infrastructure I described before — where the sidewalks are and how they connect to the crossings. Once you do that, you have that infrastructure available for the mobile app, AVIV ScoutRoute, to launch these quests on that basis.
I should mention we support all of this through weekly office hours on Tuesdays at 8 a.m. Pacific time. We're happy to have anybody join our open Zoom, and we'll answer any questions folks have.
I love that — it's actually making me think of the number of hours I've spent playing City Skylines, thinking I was never a good master planner and should have stayed away from it. I could have been doing something very functional and tangible instead, doing mapping exercises that serve a similar function of improving my community. I'm fascinated by it.
I definitely want to encourage folks listening to this to go check out the OS Connect viewer, even if you're just planning a visit to the states that have been mentioned. Or if you're thinking, "How do I begin this work of documentation?" — we just did a Strong Towns session about walk audits, and one of the things we can see is that people have started to find various ways to document this, along with low-stress bike networks and other tools that are also available. I think that really speaks to being able to understand the scope of the challenge we face in our places.
But for you, Dr. Caspi, what are some of the formative influences that gave rise to your desire to do this work and keep pressing forward in this way?
Oh my gosh — I actually come from DNA sequencing instrumentation, nowhere close to this. Then my daughter and I moved to Seattle, which is pretty hilly, and my daughter was using a wheelchair. So I joined a hackathon organized by the Seattle Department of Transportation, hoping to access this kind of information, because the big map apps — I don't want to name them — didn't tell me anything about the inclines. How am I going to get there? Will there be a curb ramp? Those kinds of simple questions still aren't available on these mass-produced apps, 12 years later. And the city wasn't quite able to answer that question either — to this day, their sidewalk data set, when they're not using ours, isn't fully connected, so it doesn't give you a routable graph.
That was really my first understanding of the mismatch between what planners are doing out there and what people living in these environments actually need. So, if you're starting out, you don't have to go big — you can just start in your own town, a school, a clinic, a bus stop, and ask: who can get here safely, who can't, and what are some small missing links that could reconnect people to this place? Document it and share it publicly. I'd ask your city to treat pedestrian access as infrastructure, because that's what it is.
I think that's the downstream lesson. Not everyone has to define a capital plan, but providing some bottom-up way to make visible the things that are mismatched with our expectations as residents is what makes cities great.
You've certainly faced, I'm sure, many setbacks and roadblocks along the way. But what are some of the things that give you hope as you do this?
Well, I'll be honest — I think the narrative is changing. Ten years ago, I would walk into a transportation committee meeting and say "sidewalks," and people would laugh; when you say transportation, it's about mega-projects and highways. Nowadays, in many ways — thanks to the work of a lot of authors, Anna Zivarts comes to mind — folks have really tried to change that narrative and highlight and elevate the stories of people who are using our walkways and bikeways to get around. That gives me a lot of hope. I think the next part is about coming together as collaboratives to influence the next wave of policy, and change will follow.
I feel like that change will also drive more of our investment decisions — we can spend limited funds well on a lot of these discrete little project improvements, and actually see significant opportunity for a whole broad range of people in our communities to benefit from it. I just love that. I'm really excited, and I like what you said too, that the tide is turning — I firmly believe that. Part of my privilege is being able to connect with folks like yourself.
If you want to follow up after listening to this, go to os-connect-viewer.tdei.us — that'll be in the show notes for those who don't follow along as I try to butcher my way through it — and check out the Taskar Center for Accessible Technology at the University of Washington. Thank you, Dr. Anat Caspi, for sharing today. I'm so glad to have had you on Bottom Up Shorts today.
Thank you so much for having me. Happy to be here for Strong Towns.
I appreciate that, as always. Thank you.
With that, folks, I hope that as you go out for a walk, you know that you're going to be able to do so with an app in hand, and be able to document more of the things you face, as well as know the needs that others face in your community — helping and doing this work together. We can do this in small, discrete, bottom-up ways, and that will certainly begin to have a profound impact. Thanks for listening. Take care, and take care of your places.
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