OpenSidewalks NYC is a pedestrian network of all five boroughs in the OpenSidewalks Schema v0.3, a format the Taskar Center for Accessible Technology designed for accessible routing. It has 4,068,058 features: sidewalks, crossings, footways, steps and curb ramps. The current release, v0.3.4-nyc.1, passes python-osw-validation 0.5.0 with zero errors. That check covers form, not the schema’s topology rules or whether the data matches the street.
It combines OpenStreetMap with three city datasets. The NYC DOT ramp survey, collected for DOT by Cyclomedia from vehicle imagery and LiDAR, mostly in 2018, gives 217,679 curb ramps with their slopes and warning surfaces. It shows that a ramp was there, not that it is usable today. Sidewalk polygons give estimated widths, and the city’s LiDAR gives estimated incline.
I routed 2,000 random trips per borough with the graph’s wheelchair profile, OpenRouteService and Valhalla. The profile refuses crossings with no surveyed ramp, steep slopes, steps and the roadway, so it finds a route less often than OpenRouteService: 91 percent of trips in Brooklyn, about half in the Bronx and on Staten Island. The comparison does not show that it routes a wheelchair user better.
The demo maps Brownsville, and how it is built follows a few blocks through the pipeline. Code is Apache-2.0. Data is ODbL-1.0, inherited from OpenStreetMap.
Disclaimer: OpenSidewalks NYC is an experimental, independent research dataset, not made or endorsed by the Taskar Center, OpenSidewalks, TDEI, NYC DOT or the City of New York. Nothing in it has been checked on the ground, so do not use it to tell anyone that a route is accessible. The full disclaimer is in the repository.