Chicago, Illinois
Aldermanic wards have used resident-collected Project Sidewalk data to prioritize sidewalk improvement funds more equitably, and our team advised the city's Pedestrian Safety Committee on moving beyond complaint-driven repairs.
We're mapping and assessing every sidewalk in the world.
Project Sidewalk is an open-source academic research project at the University of Washington and the University of Illinois Chicago that combines crowdsourcing and AI to map and assess city sidewalks — and opens every data point to researchers, governments, and communities.
Project Sidewalk by the numbers
30,000+
Kilometers explored
1,500,000+
Labels
2,000,000+
Validations
56
Cities
11
Countries
How it works
Our mission is to map and assess every sidewalk in the world using remote crowdsourcing, artificial intelligence, and online street-level imagery. Anyone with a web browser can help — no special tools required.
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Explore & label
Volunteers virtually walk city streets in a game-like web tool, labeling curb ramps, missing sidewalks, obstacles, and surface problems in street-level imagery.
Start exploring -
Validate
Contributors then review each other's labels — assisted by AI — agreeing or disagreeing with what they see, so the dataset stays accurate and trustworthy.
Validate labels -
Open data
Every label feeds an open dataset that researchers, governments, and community advocates use to understand and improve sidewalk accessibility.
Get the data
How Project Sidewalk makes impact
The goal isn't just data — it's making cities more walkable, rollable, and safe for pedestrians. Here are a few of the ways communities, governments, and schools have put Project Sidewalk to work.
Lincolnwood, Roselle & Mendota, Illinois
Project Sidewalk data helped shape ADA Transition Plans for Lincolnwood and Roselle, and community partners in Mendota used it to win a Safe Routes to School grant for safer paths to school.
Burnaby, Canada
The City of Burnaby integrated Project Sidewalk data into the prioritization framework for its New Sidewalks Program and its recently adopted Accessibility Strategy.
Newberg, Oregon
After residents mapped local sidewalks, the city council created a new sidewalk renovation program — including $50,000 for immediate repairs and grants to help homeowners fix the sidewalks outside their homes.
Zurich, Switzerland
Zurich publishes Project Sidewalk data in the city's open data portal, and the deployment won a Smart City Hub Switzerland Award in the citizen-science category.
Classrooms across the U.S.
Students use Project Sidewalk to learn data science and civic advocacy — from Girl Scouts in Oradell, New Jersey presenting findings to their city council, to middle schoolers in Waltham, Massachusetts earning statewide civics recognition.
Want more? Our sister site accessiblecommunities.org shares news, resources, and guides for putting Project Sidewalk to work in your community.
Where we are
From Seattle to Mexico City to Zurich, volunteers have put 56 cities in 11 countries on the accessibility map — one street at a time.
See every deployment, or bring Project Sidewalk to your city.
The team
Project Sidewalk is university research, led by Professor Jon E. Froehlich at the University of Washington's Makeability Lab and Professor Yochai Eisenberg at the University of Illinois Chicago, with lead engineering by Mikey Saugstad — and contributions from more than a hundred students and collaborators over the years.
Current team
Past leadership
Contributors
More than 140 people have contributed code, designs, and ideas to Project Sidewalk, including 128 students from high school through PhD. Part of our mission is to help computer science and design students work on societally impactful projects through experiential learning.
… plus community partners and thousands of volunteer mappers around the world — see the full project page for more.
Our history
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2012
Project Sidewalk begins as a research project by Professor Jon E. Froehlich and PhD student Kotaro Hara in the Makeability Lab, with early support from a Google Faculty Research Award and the National Science Foundation.
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2017
The first city-scale deployment launches in Washington, DC, led by PhD student Manaswi Saha and research scientist Mikey Saugstad, as the lab moves to the University of Washington's Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering.
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2019
The DC pilot study shows that online crowdsourcing can be used to map an entire city's sidewalks — and earns a Best Paper Award at CHI 2019.
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2021
An NSF Smart & Connected Communities grant deepens our partnership with the University of Illinois Chicago and Easterseals, expanding deployments, education programs, and our sister site accessiblecommunities.org.
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Today
Project Sidewalk operates in 56 cities around the world, natively translated into 6 languages and powered by thousands of volunteer mappers.
Related publications
Project Sidewalk research is published at leading human–computer interaction and accessibility venues. If you use our data or tools in your research, please cite our CHI 2019 paper.
Browse all Project Sidewalk publications on the Makeability Lab website.
How to cite Project Sidewalk
Citation
BibTeX
Open data & open source
Everything we collect is open. Download raw labels, label clusters, streets, and accessibility scores through our public APIs, in formats from CSV to GeoJSON — all published under CC0; see the API documentation for details and citation guidance. Our code is open source, too.
Community partners
We work hand in hand with disability advocacy organizations, governments, schools, and community groups around the world — including Easterseals, World Enabled, Liga Peatonal, and the Active Transportation Alliance — to plan deployments, run community mapping events, and turn data into local action.
Educators bring Project Sidewalk into civics and data-science classrooms, and our team and partners have piloted service-learning and workforce-development curricula for youth with disabilities. Learn how to use Project Sidewalk in your community.
Research funding
Project Sidewalk is grant-funded academic research, supported by the National Science Foundation with additional support from Google, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, PacTrans, and the UW Center for Research and Education on Accessible Technology and Experiences (CREATE).
Help us map every sidewalk
Questions, ideas, or press inquiries? Email us at sidewalk@cs.uw.edu, open an issue on GitHub, or follow us on LinkedIn and Bluesky.
