Abstract
Abstract. Sidewalk inventory is a topic whose importance is increasing together with the widespread use of smart city management. In order to manage the city properly and to make informed decisions, it is necessary to know the real conditions of the city. Furthermore, when planning and calculating cultural routes within the city, these routes must take into account the specific needs of all users. Therefore, it is important to know the conditions of the city’s sidewalk network and also their physical and geometrical characteristics. Typically, sidewalk network are generated basing on existing cartographic data, and sidewalk attributes are gathered through crowdsourcing. In this paper, the sidewalk network of an historic city was produced starting from point cloud data. The point cloud was semantically segmented in ”roads” and ”sidewalks”, and then the cluster of points of sidewalks surfaces were used to compute sidewalk attributes and to generate a vector layer composed of nodes and edges. The vector layer was then used to compute accessible paths between Points of Interest, using QGIS. The tests made on a real case study, the historic city and UNESCO site of Sabbioneta (Italy), shows a vectorization accuracy of 98.7%. In future, the vector layers and the computed paths could be used to generate maps for city planners, and to develop web or mobile phones routing apps.
Highlights
Sidewalk inventory is a process related to several aspects of the administration of a city
When dealing with a historic city, the predisposition of accessible routes and pedestrian paths connecting Points of Interest (PoI) inside the city is an important process that should take in consideration the conditions and characteristics of the sidewalk network
Each sidewalk segment was stored into a vector layer and used as network for routes computation implementing processes already existing in the software QGIS (Pella and Ose, 2018)
Summary
Sidewalk inventory is a process related to several aspects of the administration of a city. For a correct planning and for a proper and informed decision making process related to accessibility management, a prior knowledge of the current condition of the urban environment is required. When dealing with a historic city, the predisposition of accessible routes and pedestrian paths connecting Points of Interest (PoI) inside the city is an important process that should take in consideration the conditions and characteristics of the sidewalk network. For tourism management, the predisposition of routes is important, and that should be done taking in consideration the design of inclusive paths which can be accessed and exploited by all kind of users. Considering legislative framework about physical accessibility and architectural barriers (e.g., for Italy, law DM 236/1989 and DPR 503/1996) and in light of broader issues coming from practice (Marconcini et al, 2021) it is possible to define some requirements that a sidewalk should have to be considered accessible. The Italian law foresees: a minimum width of 90 cm, level difference lower than 2.5 cm, and a transverse slope lower than 1%
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