ADA Sidewalk Inventory

About the Program

Category: Transportation (Best in Category)

Year: 2020

Montgomery County, Maryland Department of Transportation's Division of Highway Services maintains 1644 linear miles of sidewalks on both Montgomery County and State of Maryland maintained roadways. Recently, more stringent state and federal ADA standards have accentuated the need for proper maintenance of sidewalks and ADA infrastructure to ensure safe passage of the traveling public and reduce Montgomery County's liability in the event of accident on County maintained sidewalks/roadways. By December of 2018, the Division of Highway Services had decided on inertial profilers mounted on a Segway to collect slope data, cracking, and grade differentials. Concurrent visual inspection allowed for collection of sidewalk width, material, issues of ADA non-compliance, and other obstructions. After consulting with the Divisions of Transportation Engineering, Traffic, and Transit the County decided to manually measure ramps, crosswalks, signalized intersections, and identify areas where new sidewalk could be added to increase modality and safety. The resulting data identified 104,465 grade differentials, other non-compliant ADA features, and geo-cached each location countywide by September of 2019. An interactive webpage was then developed to track and record the progress of repairs to the pedestrian network by date, location, repair type, and who completed the repair. This project married innovative technology and manual data collection to further asset management of Montgomery County infrastructure and provide accountability standards to meet ADA compliance goals.