7:15 – 7:45 PM – Which Sidewalks Should be Repaired?

As a city official or a member of your local public works department with a limited annual budget, out of all the sidewalks in your city, how do you decide which ones should be repaired? The city of Burlington, Vermont maintains 130 miles of sidewalks throughout their city which are all characterized by varying levels of disrepair – cracks, heaving, sloping, etc. In 2021, the city developed an innovative approach that employed an innovative data collection technology in conjunction with the creation of a custom, interactive webtool to prioritize sidewalk improvements throughout the city. Once the data was collected, the city developed a custom, web-based Shiny tool to explore the data and employ a system for prioritizing improvements. The custom webtool was built with a variety of features intended to support the city’s long-term vision of prioritizing sidewalk repairs with a limited budget into the future. Using this tool, the city can efficiently allocate their annual sidewalk repair budget to sidewalks in areas of their city that are the highest priority, based upon a variety of factors that include physical sidewalk condition, clustering of poor condition sidewalks, and characteristics of surrounding land uses, including equity considerations. Example tool features include user defined prioritization factors, web mapping, dynamic reporting, interactive plots, data management, and documentation.