NSF-Funded Student Design Projects:

Web Based Transportation Resource Guide for Individuals with Disabilities

Designers: MultiSemester see Student Teams Table
Client Coordinator:Lore Watt Corradino, Analyst, Southeast Michigan Council of Governments (SEMCOG)
Supervisors: Dr. Robert Erlandson, Mr. David Sant
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Wayne State University
Detroit, MI 48202

Multi-Semester Project Student Teams

Introduction

Perhaps the largest obstacle to sustained employment for individuals with disabilities is finding transportation to and from work. Federal law mandates that public transportation systems like SMART (Southeast Michigan Area Regional Transportation) provide service to individuals with disabilities. This service is mandated and hence if transportation demands of people with disabilities increase and local, regional and state allocations to public transportation decrease – regular service is cut to meet the mandated requirements. The proposed web based resource guide will enable Southeast Michigan Council of Governments (SEMCOG) and SMART personnel to assist individuals with disabilities in finding viable transportation from a variety of sources and thereby help reduce the load on the public carrier.

This multi-semester project developed a prototype web based transportation resource guide for individuals with disabilities. The prototype system has been used by SEMCOG staff since May of 2002.

Summary of Imapct

SEMCOG staff have used the prototype Web Based Transportation Resources Guide for Individuals with Disabilities since May 2002. The prototype system only covers portions of Wayne County, Michigan, as such it was not meant to replace the current phone-in system, but rather provide enough reality so that SEMCOG staff could provide feedback to ETL staff.

Based on the prototype system’s preliminary performance SEMCOG has written the Enabling Technologies Laboratory, Wayne State University, into its next round of funding from the U.S. Department of Transportation. This funding has been approved and work is planned to start on an operational version of the Web Based Transportation Resources Guide for Individuals with Disabilities sometime in the Fall of 2003. ETL plans to hire one of the participating students for this design and development effort.

Technical Description

The project started with exploration of a Geographic Information System (GIS) and integrated transportation and resource database as the main SEMCOG / SMART resource system. The GIS portion uses ESRI’s Arcview® and ArcIMS® systems. The Michigan Department of Transportation, and SMART provided GIS data regarding the cities and counties in southeast Michigan, as well as SMART and Detroit Department of Transportation (DDOT) bus routes. Both these agencies provided engineering and technical support for installation of their data onto the ETL system.

The first GIS effort involved securing, installing, and rendering operational the ESRI software. This first phase also involved securing community resource data, and limited bus route data from SMART. The first objective was to create a demonstration GIS system for presentation to SEMCOG and SMART staff. The demonstration system was very crude and designed to illustrate only the essential features of a GIS resource system to individuals who were not familiar with the technology and the potential benefits to their operations. This objective was meet and both SEMCOG and SMART agreed to provide additional support (staff time, data sets, information, expertise) for development of a larger scale prototype system.

SEMCOG and SMART wanted the larger scale prototype system design and development to follow two parallel paths; 1) a GIS version, and 2) a web based non-GIS implementation.

The second GIS prototype system incorporated all the available bus route data available through SMART and DDOT for the Detroit Metropolitan Area (Wayne, Oakland, and Macomb Counties). Data on private transportation suppliers were obtained from SEMCOG’s Paratransit Referral Manual. This data had to be incorporated into a GIS suitable database for inclusion with the bus route information. Further, the design students worked with faculty from Wayne State University’s Center for Urban Studies as well as SEMCOG to obtain data on community resources available to individuals with disabilities to help them obtain and secure employment. These resources include community economic development organizations, churches, vocational job placement agencies, and child day-care providers.

Figure 1 shows a screen image of Wayne County with preliminary data. Shown are major bus routes, the home location of selected clients and a key as to their employment status (employed, part-time, seeking, and unemployed), area businesses and a key as to their employment plans (seeking fulltime-hiring, seeking part time hiring, not hiring).

Figure 1. Screen image of Wayne County, Michigan, showing major bus routes, the homes of selected clients and selected local area businesses.

The third related project is the non-GIS Web Based Transportation Resources Guide for Individuals with Disabilities. This project utilized an Access database which contained a subset of the information contained in the SEMCOG Paratransit Referral Manual. A prototype web based information management and reservation system was designed and implemented in cooperation with SEMCOG staff. Figure 2 shows a sample screen from that system.

Figure 2. This shows one of the user input/output screens that SEMCOG staff uses to plan and reserve transportation for individuals with disabilities.