Transportation Data Exchange Initiative
Background
Detailed, accurate data about pedestrian networks, travel environments like transit facilities and on-demand travel services are crucial for any trip planner, trip concierge, wayfinding, or exploratory mobile application, in particular applications and mobile experiences serving the needs of people with disabilities, older adults, veterans, suburban and rural populations. However, there is no single source of data repository to discover such data, nor the data standards exist to describe such data.
Solution
To address this problem, University of Washington’s Taskar Center for Accessible Technology in collaboration with Washington State Transportation Center, assisted by Gaussian Solutions proposed Transportation Data Exchange Initiative (TDEI) and is sponsored by The Complete Trip, an ITS4US Deployment Program from USDoT.
Our project addresses inequities in transportation data and travel information via a three-pronged approach:
- Enhance data standards to include information relevant to all travelers and transit stakeholders.
- Provide tools and data infrastructure reducing barriers for data stewards to collect, vet, maintain and use traveler-centric transportation data at scale.
- Demonstrate our work through pilot data collections with private and public partners, and demonstration projects that make use of our data.
Goals:
- Define and assist in creating data standards specifications to provide data format and guidance for sharing
- Deploy a shared data repository for data generators, contributors and consumers can disseminate standardized, interoperable data and interfaces, and that enables
- Prime the system with pedestrian data from 6 counties: King, and Snohomish in Washington State, Multnomah and Columbia in Oregon, Baltimore and Montgomery from Maryland.
- Provide editing tools to facilitate correcting and validating datasets collaboratively
- Develop demonstration applications that showcase the use of such transit data
Work so far:
We completed first version of TDEI with four main components:
- TDEI Core: The main core of the project that enables registering of users, and organizations (we call project groups), services, and to upload and release datasets for the services, and provides ability for consumers to search, discover and download datasets. Apart from being a central repository of pedestrian transit data, the system also provides useful tools to calculate the metrics and determine the quality of the data. The system supports data in three formats: OpenSidewalks (OSW), GTFS-Pathways and GTFS-Flex
- TDEI Workspaces: A collaborative platform for data generators to edit, validate and release new datasets
- Accessmap and Walksheds tools that demonstrate how various datasets can be combined to provide insightful routing and equity analysis tools
- GoInfoGame, a mobile application that is useful to do on ground audit and corrections of pedestrian data
Gaussian Solutions was involved from day 1 to define and develop both functional and non-functional requirements for the system. Stay tuned to know more technical details and how the implementation was done by us in follow up blogs.
Unified Open Sidewalks Dataset for Washington State
Background
Access to safe, functional sidewalks is critical for building sustainable, equitable, and inclusive communities. Yet, in many parts of Washington, data about the pedestrian environment—such as sidewalk availability, condition, and connectivity—is incomplete or unavailable. This data gap hinders city planners from setting concrete project goals or evaluating environmental and accessibility impacts. It also discourages the public from choosing active transportation options.
Under the directive of the Washington State Legislature and in partnership with Gaussian Solutions LLC, the Taskar Center for Accessible Technology at the University of Washington is creating a comprehensive, high-quality pedestrian network dataset that includes sidewalks data across the state.
The project supports equitable mobility by equipping state agencies, local governments, and community organizations with the data needed to plan Complete Streets and prioritize resources effectively. Additionally, it aligns with Vision Zero safety initiatives by enabling data-driven decisions to prevent pedestrian injuries. Updating and expanding this dataset will empower Washington to provide all residents—especially vulnerable populations—with safe, accessible, and sustainable transportation options.
The Challenge
Mapping pedestrian infrastructure (sidewalks, crossings, curbs, traffic islands, etc.) for a state as large as Washington is a monumental task. Spanning approximately 185,000 square kilometers, the state’s pedestrian network is vast. Even discounting uninhabited forest areas, the target mapping area is still 8,550 square kilometers. Mapping such a large area manually would require an immense amount of time and manpower—an approach that is neither feasible nor cost-effective.
The Solution
Gaussian Solutions in partnership with the Taskar Center for Accessible Technology at Paul G Allen School of Engineering in University of Washington, Seattle have developed an AI-powered pedestrian infrastructure mapping solution. This solution accelerates the mapping process by more than 100x compared to manual efforts.
Using an AI-assisted, human-in-the-loop approach, the team generates high-quality, detailed, and connected pedestrian network data. This data is invaluable to transit agencies and city planners, enabling a wide range of analyses and applications.
The Technology
We developed Pedestrian Routing Infrastructure and Street Mapping AI (PRISM-AI) to solve the challenging task of mapping the missing key link in a complete street and transportation analysis: pedestrian network including sidewalks, crossings and curbs. PRISM-AI is a deep neural network based AI model that uses advances in computer vision and AI to ingest aerial imagery and produce high quality routable graph network of pedestrian infrastructure. Read more about the technology here.
The Data
We have completed the baseline mapping of the entire State of Washington that resulted in 39000km of sidewalks, 6700km of crosswalks, and 747000 curb locations. Sidewalks are enhanced with incline, surface and width information. You can view the data here
All the datasets are released via Transportation Data Equity Initiative(TDEI). Read about the TDEI project more here. All datasets are accessible by signing up in TDEI portal.
What’s next
We are putting final touches to the datasets ensuring all the data and the metadata is correct and is easily consumable by downstream applications. We are looking into expanding the elements we capture in the pedestrian infrastructure and to include the bike infrastructure as well.
Stay updated on our progress by following our LinkedIn page: Gaussian Solutions LLC on LinkedIn.
If you are interested in accessing this data, reach out to us at info@gaussiansolutions.com. We’d love to hear about your projects and how our detailed sidewalk data can support them.