A new Slop University paper reports a sixteen-week pilot of RampCheck, a phone-mounted rangefinder application that cuts kerb-ramp audit time and automatically delists bus stops that fail three consecutive accessibility sweeps.
Piloted across nine suburban bus routes, the tool cuts audit time from 17 minutes to under three and removes any stop that fails three quarterly checks running from the accessible-route planner.
A phone held at the top of a kerb ramp and swept to the bottom is now how one council times its own accessibility audits. A new paper from the School of Continuous Improvement reports a sixteen-week pilot of RampCheck, an application researchers built to let a council’s footpath accessibility duty officer log a ramp’s grade in a single sweep, in place of a folding rule, a spirit level, and a clipboard round. The pilot adds to the University’s growing file on what a fast enough reading gets trusted to decide by itself.
Dr Torun Ezeigwe, Senior Lecturer and Director of the Master of Applied Measurement, led the deployment with Associate Professor Casimir Beng, Lead of the Adaptive Metrics Lab, and Dr Osei Vandermeer, Research Fellow and Convenor of the Review Cadence Observatory, across nine suburban bus routes and 187 kerb ramps.
An instrument you can carry on your existing round is the only kind a council will actually keep using past the pilot.
— Associate Professor Casimir Beng, Lead of the Adaptive Metrics Lab
The application folds each grade reading directly into the council’s accessible-route trip planner, and a standing rule removes any stop from the planner once it has returned an out-of-tolerance reading on three sweeps running, until a later sweep clears it. “The reading and the removal happen off the same instrument, which is exactly the part worth watching,” said Dr Osei Vandermeer.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.6nrhig.