Waymap has mapped all 98 rail stations and over 11,000 bus stops in Washington, D.C.'s transit system. (Photo on left by Connor Gan / Unsplash; photo on right courtesy Waymap)
Imagine descending into the depths of an unfamiliar subway system only to lose service on your phone. How will you find the correct subway platform?
Wayfinding in a complicated transit system can be confusing — especially for people who are blind or have sight loss and don’t have access to visual cues.
Last month, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority rolled out a partnership with Waymap, a wayfinding app that provides step-by-step audio directions for transit riders. Initially created for people with vision loss, the app aims to help anyone navigate indoor and outdoor locations without access to mobile data or WiFi.
The company mapped all 98 rail stations and over 11,000 bus stops in the WMATA system —over 30 million square feet — using Lidar and 360-degree video.
The result: Wayfinding that pinpoints locations with three feet of accuracy — far more accurate than GPS – and capable of taking the user to an elevator deep underground.
“Our app will tell you how to walk to your closest public transport node, which specific vehicle to get, on whether that’s bus or rail. It will tell you step-by-step how to get to the platform, how to walk to the exits, and then all the way to your end destination,” explains Waymap CEO Celso Zuccollo.
It all started with Waymap founder Tom Pey, who himself has sight loss. While heading up the London-based social impact business Royal Society for Blind Children, he was charged with creating a way for blind kids to navigate public transportation on their own. In 2017, Pey founded Waymap.
Research shows that people with vision loss often stick to a few familiar routes and can be hesitant to navigate a new route alone. “Instead of 2.5 routes you can do 25 routes, 250 routes,” Pey told Reuters about Waymap back in 2022. “This will allow more people to become more independent — not to have to rely on family and friends — and use public transport like everyone else.”
In 2019, a chance meeting between Pey and a WMATA staff member started a multi-year partnership to increase accessibility within the system. Waymap conducted two pilots in 2021 and 2022, followed by extensive development and user testing.
This is the first transit system mapped in its entirety by Waymap, which is also deployed in cities across the world, including transit stations in Singapore, Spain and Australia.
The partnership started at no cost to WMATA; Zuccollo declined to share details about the current contract. Although the process with the agency took years, he expects Waymap could now roll out wayfinding for a similar-sized transit agency in about six months.
How does Waymap work?
Unlike other wayfinding technology that uses GPS, WiFi or mobile data, Waymap uses the inertial measurement sensors built into most smartphones.
First, Waymap establishes the user’s starting location using either GPS or visual positioning. If there’s no signal, the app can match photos taken by the user’s phone to 3D imagery captured during the mapping phase. Once the starting position is determined, the app can track the user’s movement through space.
Most wayfinding technologies use triangulation to determine a person’s location, explains Zuccollo, whether on a macro scale with satellites or on a micro scale with Bluetooth beacons, Wi-Fi fingerprinting or QR codes. Instead of using external signals, Waymap uses the sensors built into every smartphone.
“Each of those tell us in a really unstructured, noisy way how the phone is moving.”
Waymap runs the data through its algorithms to determine step length and step direction.
“Regardless of where you are in the world, indoor, outdoor, deep underground, our system works exactly the same,” says Zuccollo.
This means that, unlike other wayfinding apps, you don’t have to have your cell phone out to read the environment, something that was important for people who use a white cane or guide dog to navigate.
“All of our users were saying, please allow me some kind of option where I can put my phone in my pocket, use some bone-conducting headphones, or whatever headphones they prefer, and then get instructions as you walk around.”
He stressed that Waymap is not meant to be a primary mobility aid or replace tactile wayfinding for transit riders.
Waymap’s goal is to map as many buildings as possible all over the world — to become the Waze of the built environment. In the future, Zuccollo believes that Waymap could use crowdsourcing to report changes to the interior landscape in real-time.
“With this kind of community based approach, what we can do is, over time, we can really get to a situation where people are helping one another get around by feeding back through the app that, you know, this escalator is down, or this door is shut,” he says.
This story was produced through our Equitable Cities Fellowship for Social Impact Design, which is made possible with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.