Scooter to help assess disabled access on Bellevue's sidewalks

Wearing a bright-orange vest and bicycle helmet, Franz Loewenherz rode a high-tech Segway electric scooter up and down the paved entrance to Bellevue City Hall Thursday while TV cameras and photographers followed his every move.

Although the Segway can go up to 12.5 mph, the Bellevue transportation planner rode it at 6 mph, collecting 10,000 records of data per second.

Loewenherz was demonstrating how Bellevue plans to use the $120,000 Segway to see how accessible the city's sidewalks are to people with disabilities and whether they meet the requirements of the federal Americans with Disabilities Act.

The scooter is equipped with a laser, accelerometer and optical trigger to measure changes in sidewalk level and slope. The data can be used to find potential obstacles such as misplaced signs and poles, and buckled and uneven sidewalks.

The Segway also has a video camera that films the sidewalk from the viewpoint of a person in a wheelchair, a laptop to record the data and a global positioning system to match the data with a location.

"Someone driving by in a car and looking at a sidewalk and seeing if it was compliant [with ADA requirements] didn't satisfy my requirement for accuracy," Loewenherz said. "This technology offers a very high degree of accuracy and very quick turnaround."

The technology was developed by the Office of Pavement Technology, part of the Federal Highway Administration, after Loewenherz suggested the using a Segway to measure sidewalk accessibility. The scooter is on loan to Bellevue as part of a pilot project to collect data on the city's sidewalks.

The city will analyze the data and outline a schedule of improvements for city sidewalks.

The city expects the Segway's one-of-a kind technology to save it hundreds of thousands of dollars. The other option was to send out a skilled crew to measure the city's 336 miles of sidewalks at a rate of $60 an hour, which could take a year or more and cost more than $1 million, Loewenherz said.

Two summer interns will take turns operating the Segway at a rate of $15 an hour. They will start measuring Aug. 1 and expect to finish by the end of September.

"I think it's a very great opportunity," said Sarah Squires, one of the interns. "It'll be a cool introduction to all these electronics. I'm just getting used to them and learning what they do."

Taya Flores: 206-464-3825 or tflores@seattletimes.com