The Health Through Housing (HTH) Initiative is an innovative approach that accelerates King County’s response to chronic homelessness. Through partnerships and close collaboration between city governments, service providers and local communities, HTH purchased former hotels and converted them into permanent and emergency supportive housing that provides wraparound services to residents.
King County Metro is providing a variety of mobility assistance programs to ensure residents of HTH sites have mobility services to access their essential needs. However, one of the critical challenges faced by HTH residents is pedestrian accessibility. Safe and reliable access to transit, healthcare, grocery stores, and other essential services is vital for improving the quality of life and promoting independence. Recognizing this need, the Connecting to Transit and Health Through Housing teams at King County Metro will complete the Pedestrian Accessibility Mapping (PAM) Project in partnership with the Taskar Center for Accessible Technology at the University of Washington.
Objectives
The Health Through Housing Pedestrian Accessibility Mapping Project aims to develop a comprehensive dataset of accessible pedestrian data, and to propose pedestrian improvement projects to improve access for HTH residents. The project is conducted in three phases: Data Collection, Field Verification, and Project Identification.
- Data Collection
The first phase of this project will set up cloud infrastructure to store and analyze data, producing extension files for OpenSidewalks. Interim and final reports will present walkshed analyses near HTH sites, detailing existing conditions of infrastructure, environment, and walking and rolling experiences. These reports will include supporting media such as photos, diagrams, and plan sketches, and will be underpinned by narratives explaining the methodology, assumptions, and areas of uncertainty.
- Field Verification
The second phase will establish a private OSM cloud instance to host manually collected and satellite-predicted data, as well as a collaborative mapping infrastructure for HTH facilities, managed by the TDEI workspaces administrator. The project manager will coordinate activities such as engaging with HTH personnel, deploying the mobile app, and conducting resident interviews. Additionally, the project manager will organize Taskar Center students and HTH residents to walk pedestrian networks within a 10-minute walkshed of HTH sites, capturing photo documentation of access barriers via the mobile app. An HTH cloud tenancy in the TDEI will be created for data utilization in AccessMap and Walksheds tools. Lastly, walkability data from Phase 2 will be joined with Phase 1 data for joint analysis, and project manager will ensure the walking-collection application meets HTH residents’ needs through interviews and liaising with KCM personnel.
- Project Identification
The final phase will follow guidelines from the Connecting to Transit team, combining data collection and field assessment to enable computational analytics and prioritization schemes. The project methodology will align with King County Metro’s Access to Transit Improvement Methodology (2018). We will identify discrete access improvement projects, such as filling sidewalk gaps and upgrading intersections with ADA-compliant curb ramps. Written reports will describe the computational tools and prioritization schema used, and will include maps showing the impacted walksheds before and after the proposed improvements
Looking Ahead
Project outcomes will include a managed dataset hosted on the TDEI cloud instance, collaborative mapping infrastructure for HTH facilities, and a cloud tenancy for data utilization in AccessMap and Walksheds tools. We will produce interim and final reports presenting walksheds analysis near HTH sites, a joint analysis report combining Phase 1 and Phase 2 data, and a list of identified access improvement projects based on Phase 3 analysis.
In the near-term, we will use data to produce walking and rolling maps for HTH sites to educate and empower residents to walk and roll for short trips to transit and nearby destinations.In the longer term, the Connecting to Transit team will incorporate identified access improvements into their partnership and funding pursuits to support implementation of walking and rolling improvements that connect HTH sites to transit. Data collection conducted in partnership with the Taskar Center students will be used by the students to identify improvement projects. Collected accessibility data will be integrated with Accessmap.app and OpenSidewalks, platforms for accessible trip planning used by the Metro Access team and available to the public.