Community Story: A Pedestrians Street Level View Through A Wheelchair
This week in Mexico City, Mapillary had the opportunity to participate in a walk through the city center as part of the 3rd edition of Liga Peatonal, a non-profit organization in Mexico that promotes better infrastructure for pedestrians.
The event started near the Zocalo of Mexico City, some 50 people gathered around the Mexican flag and began to walk as a person with disabilities. The organizers had wheelchairs and blindfolds for participants that wanted to experience how pedestrians with disabilities experience every day moving around downtown.
This was our second ground work event in the city center (our first one was during the National Earthquake Drill), so we where excited to again work with OpenStreetMap Mexico. We provided bike mounts to the participants who retrofitted the mounts in to the wheelchairs to get a street level view of a person with disabilities.
There are many concerns regarding pedestrians rights in the city as Mexico City has a lot of car traffic and very little infrastructure is being built to the ever growing needs of pedestrians, specially those with disabilities. The organizers from Liga Peatonal want to empower their members to document their needs and they see Mapillary as a good platform to provide visual evidence of it.
As you can see in some of the mapping we did with the participants on wheelchairs, there are a lot of construction being done around downtown which make it really difficult for them to move from one place to another and on top of there is a lot of wear of the public spaces from the 1 million people that walk there everyday.
Citizens are doing there part in documenting their environment and we are proud to play a part in their activities. This will be the beginning of how people can leverage maps and tell a visual story about their day to day struggles with their environment. Mapillary can visualize the unique perspective on a map powered by Open Data.
This mapping event has thought us that next time you see a crack on the street you can now understand the view from a pedestrian with disabilities who passes there every day. We are looking forward to help organizations like Liga Peatonal reach their goals in community outreach.
If you have an initiative that you think Mapillary can help in bringing visual information on a map, please let us know because we are interested in helping you achieve this goal in creating stories around photos and maps.
Happy Mapping!
/Claudio