Map
The routes on this page come from this project's wheelchair profile. It is a fixed set of rules that the author adapted from the Unweaver routing engine. It refuses steps. It refuses the roadway, so it finds no way where OpenStreetMap has no separately drawn sidewalk. It refuses a crossing unless the ramp survey has a ramp within 16 ft (5 m) of each end. It refuses any stretch steeper than 8.3% uphill or 10% downhill. It does not read a ramp's slope or DOT's rating, so it will send you over ramps DOT rated Non-Compliant. These rules have not been tested with wheelchair users.
Incline is given in percent. An incline of 8.3% is a rise of 1 inch for every 12 inches of length (1 in 12). That is the steepest a new curb ramp may be under the ADA design standards. 5% is 1 in 20. A stretch called close to level in the route steps is under 2%, or 1 in 50.
What the map draws is also given as text on this page: routes under Routes, the network under Network in numbers and every intersection's ramps under Curb ramps. Where part of a route runs on ways this graph does not include, its route card says so. With the map focused, the arrow keys move it and the plus and minus keys zoom.
Show on the map
Streets, sidewalks and crossings: © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL). Curb ramps: NYC DOT. Sidewalk width: NYC planimetric survey. Incline: NYC 2017 LiDAR. Full credits are under Sources.
Routes
These routes are a test. None has been checked on the street. Read the Disclaimer to see what has not been checked. The map and routes come from release v0.3.3; Sources says what the latest release changed.
Each trip below was computed three ways on the same OpenStreetMap extract of 1 October 2026: by this graph's wheelchair profile, by OpenRouteService's wheelchair profile on plain OpenStreetMap data, and by OpenRouteService's ordinary walking profile. The trips run from public housing developments and senior centers to clinics, schools, libraries and playground misting stations (from the Cool It! NYC 2020 list, which may not match what is there today), all taken from public city datasets. No trip shown here starts at a subway entrance, because the data cannot say whether an entrance has steps.
Each route card counts the ramps on the route by DOT's rating. The ratings are from DOT's assessment of its survey, last edited in December 2020. Where DOT lists a corner as rebuilt after the survey, the rating is older than the rebuild and may not describe the ramp there now.
Lengths and widths are in feet, with meters in parentheses. A mapped sidewalk width is the average width of the city's sidewalk outline from the curb to the building line. The clear path past poles, trees and stoops is narrower and was not measured.
Network in numbers
The same network the map draws, as counts. Sidewalk width is the average width of the city's mapped sidewalk outline between the curb and the building line, from the planimetric survey. The clear path left by poles, trees and stoops is narrower and was not measured. Incline comes from the city's 2017 airborne LiDAR.
Curb ramps
Ramp positions and measurements come from NYC DOT's Pedestrian Ramp Locations data. DOT's contractor, Cyclomedia, collected them from street-level imagery and LiDAR (laser scanning) recorded from vehicles. Most ramps were captured in 2018, and the records span March 2017 to January 2020. The survey was not a hand measurement with a level, and nobody on this project has measured a ramp.
Each ramp carries a label from DOT's assessment of that survey. The assessment layer was last edited in December 2020. The labels are DOT's, not a finding of this project. DOT's own caveats apply to all of them:
Please note that measurements shown are not indicative of whether a particular ramp is compliant with design and construction standards pursuant to the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). DOT applies additional parameters in its compliance assessment of the data collected by Cyclomedia, including specific site constraints located at or near a pedestrian ramp, otherwise referred to as a technical infeasibility in the ADA. [...] As such, compliance determinations at some locations require further analysis and site inspection. These locations are noted as “Pending Technical Review” in the published assessment.
Please note that this information may contain errors and may not be complete.
Pending Technical Review means that the survey data received for a particular ramp is being reviewed to determine its compliance with the 2010 American’s With Disabilities Act (ADA) Standards for Accessible Design.
Some locations that have been included may be outside of DOT’s jurisdiction.
What the labels mean
| Label | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Compliant | DOT's assessment of the survey found that the ramp met the standard DOT applies. It is not a ground check. |
| Non-Compliant | DOT's assessment of the survey found that the ramp did not meet that standard. |
| Pending Technical Review | Not decided in DOT's assessment. DOT says these ramps need further review, and at some locations a site inspection, before it decides. The assessment layer was last edited in December 2020, so the label shows where things stood then. |
| No DOT assessment | The ramp is in the survey but has no row in DOT's assessment layer. |
| Constructed | DOT: “locations that were constructed since July 2017.” This page calls a corner rebuilt only when DOT's construction end date falls after the ramp's survey date. Otherwise it says the work was on or before the survey date. |
| Planned Construction | DOT: “locations that were recently resurfaced and are undergoing assessment and planning, or are part of other projects that trigger pedestrian ramp work.” |
| Not Assigned | DOT: corners that “have not been resurfaced since July 2017.” |
| Not Required | DOT: “locations where an upgrade or installation is not required.” |
| Complex | DOT: “A complex corner requires the development of a unique design drawing prior to installation or upgrade of a pedestrian ramp due to existing site conditions and therefore may take longer to construct.” DOT joins it to another label, as in Complex Constructed or Complex Planned Construction. |
| Two or more statuses in one row | The corners at that intersection have different statuses. Each row of the table below is one intersection, which has up to four corners. |
| No progress record | The corner is not in DOT's progress file. |
Corner labels quoted from NYC DOT's program progress page. Corner statuses come from DOT's progress file, read 2 October 2026.
Find an intersection
| Intersection | Surveyed ramps | DOT's assessment of the survey | Since the survey |
|---|
What is verified and what is not
Disclaimer
OpenSidewalks NYC is an experimental dataset. This project has not checked any of it, or anything on this page, on the ground. Nobody has traveled these routes or measured these ramps for this project. Do not use it to tell anyone that a route is accessible. Do not rely on it, on this page or on an app built from it to plan a trip.
No wheelchair user, community organization or disability organization has reviewed this page, the data or the wheelchair profile.
The curb ramp survey shows that a ramp was there when it was captured, mostly in 2018, not that it is usable today. Incline and sidewalk width are estimates.
OpenSidewalks NYC is an independent project by Adam Munawar Rahman. It is not made or endorsed by the Taskar Center for Accessible Technology, OpenSidewalks or the Transportation Data Equity Initiative (TDEI), nor by NYC DOT or the City of New York.
Language models drafted most of the code and documentation and did the imagery ratings. The ratings under What is verified were done by language-model raters (Anthropic Claude models, exact versions not recorded) following a written protocol, not by people. How This Was Made says how they were used.