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Good practice Imported

Wheelmap — Crowdsourced Wheelchair-Accessibility Mapping

Germany · Berlin · See the Germany profile · See the Berlin profile

Evidence: Descriptive / self-reported Top 24% 92/100 · Ask Evidence Copilot about this practice

Berlin NGO Sozialhelden's Wheelmap lets anyone rate a place's wheelchair accessibility with a traffic-light system on an open map. Over 2 million places marked since 2010, with ~300 new entries added daily by volunteers worldwide.

2,000,000+ places
Places marked
~1.7 million locations
Additional locations via accessibility.cloud
~300 entries/day
New entries added daily

Details

Maturity
Established
Promoter
Sozialhelden e.V.
Period
2010–present
Keywords
wheelchair accessibility, crowdsourcing, open data, mapping

Context

Wheelmap.org is a crowdsourced, OpenStreetMap-based tool created in 2010 by the Berlin non-profit Sozialhelden e.V. Anyone can mark whether a public place is fully, partially, or not wheelchair accessible, using a simple green/yellow/red rating.

Activities

The platform has grown to over 2 million volunteer-marked places, supplemented by roughly 1.7 million further locations imported through the related accessibility.cloud data-aggregation project Sozialhelden also runs. Community contributors add around 300 new entries per day.

Results

Because coverage depends on volunteer activity, data density varies sharply by region and is much higher in Germany than elsewhere; a peer-reviewed study in Open Geospatial Data (2017) used Wheelmap's dataset to model and flag these regional coverage gaps.

Conclusions

The peer-reviewed analysis of incomplete volunteered data fed back into how coverage gaps are identified and targeted, informing efforts to prioritise under-mapped areas.

Implementation
Indicative cost
Low (< €50k)
Time to results
Long (> 3 years)
Staffing & skills
Sozialhelden e.V.

Conditions for success

  • Simple traffic-light rating system lowering the barrier to volunteer contribution
  • Integration with OpenStreetMap and the accessibility.cloud data-aggregation project

Common failure modes

  • Coverage depends heavily on volunteer activity and is much higher in Germany than elsewhere

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Data sources

Where this practice's information was retrieved from, and when.

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