Enable mobility equity by creating an interoperable, shared data infrastructure to fill in gaps in current transportation data
Customer: University of Washington, Seattle
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.