Mind your step: Monitoring Pedestrian Sidewalks

Urban sidewalks are of primary importance in a city environment, allowing for pedestrian flow distribution, and making up for an essential component of every city. Yet, pedestrian sidewalks have to live together with other transportation channels, like streets, and the result is that they tend to be seen as secondary with respect to traffic in most parts of the cities. The result of this policy is that the detection of their actual status, and corresponding maintenance, is often far from optimal. In this study we tackle the problem of monitoring pedestrian sidewalks, in order to promptly and effectively handle their maintenance. Following the Smart Cheap City (SCC) approach, we design and implement a system of sensors that allows to gather pedestrian data by staying within a very limited budget. We then show how this raw data can be turned into valuable information about the actual pedestrian flows, and then investigate the relationship between this flow information and the problem of sidewalks monitoring. We experiment with the system in a real city context, using various configurations, and show the effectiveness of the method when used on the field. The overall lesson is that the problem of sidewalks monitoring, and related maintenance, can be faced even when employing very limited resources, therefore allowing for a better handling of these transportation channels even when dealing with large urban areas.