Bolt scooters already travel around cities collecting information about potholes, slopes and irregularities to ensure the safety of the vehicles and facilitate their maintenance. Now, the European shared mobility platform wants to take advantage of that same data to solve another problem: the lack of information on the state of surfaces when calculating an accessible route for people who use wheelchairs.

The company has launched “Wheels4Wheels”, an initiative developed together with Serviceplan Group, from Germany, which uses the sensors already installed on its scooters to analyze the surfaces on which they circulate and subsequently transfer that information to open maps. The objective is that it can be used free of charge by navigation services, municipal administrations, organizations and developers.

The starting point of the project is a lack of current navigation systems. Some tools allow you to calculate routes while avoiding obvious obstacles, such as stairs, but the information available on the type and condition of the pavement remains limited. And for a person in a wheelchair, knowing in advance whether the route runs on a smooth, cobbled or especially irregular surface can affect the viability of the route.

Bolt and Serviceplan recall in the presentation of the project that around 80 million people around the world depend on a wheelchair to get around and cite a 2013 study in which all participants reported chronic pain related to the constant vibrations experienced when driving on uneven surfaces.

“Wheels4Wheels” thus takes advantage of accelerometers, gyroscopes, GPS receivers and cameras that Bolt scooters already incorporate for their usual safety and maintenance operations.

The technology analyzes the information recorded during daily trips and transforms it into evaluations of the quality of the surface using a five-point scale. Thus, each ride taken by a Bolt user can simultaneously contribute to building a more detailed picture of road conditions.

The first pilot has been carried out in Tallinn (Estonia). The scooters traveled 550 kilometers in the city’s eight districts and collected 40.5 million accelerometer readings, which generated 66,088 individual surface evaluations. The system was further contrasted through manual mapping and, as a result of the project, the information available on the quality of surfaces in the city increased by 26%.
“Being in a wheelchair prepares you for the unexpected,” explains Hendra Raud, an accessibility activist from Tallinn. “Cobblestones make your whole body ache, and getting stuck can ruin your entire schedule. You feel frustrated. So it’s a great feeling to finally have a map of the world as we really experience it.”

One of the keys to the project is precisely not creating a specific application that users have to download. The entire “Wheels4Wheels” technological pipeline has been published as open source software under the MIT license, allowing any city, organization or developer to access, run and adapt it.
The data obtained is incorporated into OpenStreetMap, the open cartographic database, from where it can feed applications capable of calculating routes taking into account the type of surface. The information is also available to other developers and platforms that want to integrate it into their own services.

“We have long shared this data with partner cities to help improve streets and sidewalks for everyone. ‘Wheels4Wheels’ takes it a step further by making that same information directly available to the people who need it most, without creating a new application, but rather by improving the maps they already use”says Ardo Reinsalu, Bolt Vehicle Director.

The initiative’s growth potential is tied to Bolt’s own scale. According to data provided by the company, it operates more than 230,000 scooters in more than 270 cities, whose trips generate millions of information points every day.

More info: Wheels4Wheels