Wheelchair-Accessible Routing That Solves The Stale-Crowdsourced-Data Problem Every Existing App Dies On
Wheelmap, Route4U, and Google Maps' accessible routing all run on volunteer-contributed data that is sparse and outdated outside major cities, and OpenStreetMap's own wheelchair-routing page admits the data is heavily outdated in places. Wheelchair users can't trust a route that doesn't know about a missing curb cut, a temporary closure, or whether a step-free entrance still exists. The opportunity is not another crowdsourced map but a way to keep accessibility data fresh automatically.
The trap is building app number thirteen with the same volunteer-tagging model that killed apps one through twelve. The defensible play is automated freshness, instrumented-wheelchair sensor data, street-imagery vision, or municipal works feeds, so the map self-heals instead of waiting on a contributor.
landscape (3 existing solutions)
A dozen apps have attempted wheelchair routing; nearly all rot because crowdsourced accessibility data goes stale faster than volunteers refresh it. The unsolved problem is data freshness, not the UI.