Walk This Way

Inspiration

Walking is one of the most fundamental human activities and it important for us physically, mentally and emotionally. Today’s navigation apps prioritize speed and efficiency, often defaulting to car routes and overlooking the pedestrian experience. They treat all pedestrians the same, ignoring diverse needs like wheelchair and stroller accessibility, shaded paths for hot days, or well-lit, safer routes for nighttime travel.

What it does

Walk This Way allows users to customize their walking route. Users can choose between 3 'modes' to suit their needs - a green mode, night mode, and holistic mode. Green mode integrates attributes on tree coverage and proximity to parks. Night mode takes attributes on lighting and safety. Holistic mode is a combination of green mode and night mode.

How we built it

We used ArcGIS Pro to integrate (spatial join) different features of our data to create a single shape file. We used this shape file and extracted some specific attributes for weighted cost metric. Using that weighted cost metric, we created our own custom routing for our different modes. This exposed a geojson that was then integrated using ArcGIS Maps SDK for JavaScript.

Challenges we ran into

Our initial idea of using network analyst turned out to be not feasible as custom routing based on weights for our features was not possible. Also, if using network analyst, we had to create a network dataset which would then in-turn be used to publish a network layer on Enterprise. But we didn't have access to enterprise so this wasn't feasible as well. Using the ArcGIS Maps SDK for JavaScript for our visualisation required us to code/edit some aspects in order for it to render "beautiful" routes and take in start and end locations for computing the route.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Since none of the existing routing API's could be integrated with custom costs/weights for specific features, finding a novel solution to this problem was a success.

What we learned

We learned to use ArcGIS Maps SDK for JavaScript, learnt how to work with shapefiles and create our own weighted cost metric for custom routing. Learning and honing our ArcGIS Pro skills along the way was fun too!