Optimizing the planning of pedestrian facilities upgrade projects to maximize accessibility for people with disabilities

Federal and state laws require governments to ensure accessibility for people with disabilities on their pedestrian facilities. State and local governments are required to develop transition plans to upgrade inaccessible pedestrian facilities to fully comply with all accessibility requirements. This paper presents the development of a novel model that is capable of optimizing the scheduling of pedestrian facilities upgrade projects to maximize compliance with accessibility laws and regulations. The model provides original contributions to support decision makers in (1) quantifying the impact of upgrading noncompliant pedestrian facilities on people with disabilities; (2) identifying near-optimal trade-offs among the three optimization objectives of minimizing total number of interrupted pedestrian trips, minimizing total upgrade duration, and minimizing annual upgrade budget; (3) generating detailed schedules for upgrading noncompliant pedestrian facilities to satisfy ADA transition plan requirements; and (4) creating graphic maps of the generated near-optimal transition plans. A case study of a real-life city that includes 4,178 noncompliant pedestrian facilities was analyzed to evaluate the performance of the model and illustrate its novel and unique capabilities.