01698175

Component

The wheelchair pathway roughness index of the ASTM is a useful tool for assessing the quality of sidewalks and classifying them from very good to impassable. The WPRI Matlab code was first recoded and tested by the provided sample profile. Computer-generated trigonometric sine waves considering 294 combinations of wave amplitude, wave period length, and data point interval were used for WPRI sensitivity analysis. Apart from the suggested wheelchair caster size of 70 mm, the commonly used caster sizes of 150 and 180 mm were also included in the sensitivity analysis. Findings indicate that large wave period length, small wave amplitude, and large caster size result in low WPRI. This observation is particularly true when the wheelchair caster size is larger than the wave period length. However, a data point interval in the range of 0.5-6 mm inconsiderably affects the WPRI. Taipei City sidewalks were examined by a lightweight inertial profiler for data collection, followed by WPRI analysis. However, sidewalk paving materials of bricks may induce unexpected noises due to the unfilled gaps. This condition will result in biased WPRI for serviceability evaluation. Thus, small-scale subjective panel rating and wheelchair body vibration measurement were conducted for pathway assessment to determine the correlation between the two methods and the WPRI. The acceleration root-mean-square index calculated from the response-based body vibration measurement has better correlation to wheelchair users’ perception than the WPRI. The future study will include sufficient sections and focus on developing a noise elimination algorithm of WPRI for brick paving materials.

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ABE60 Standing Committee on Accessible Transportation and Mobility.

19-04653

English

6p

2019

Transportation Research Board 98th Annual Meeting

Digital/other

Figures; References

Evaluation; Roughness; Sensitivity analysis; Serviceability; Sidewalks; Vibration; Walkways; Wheelchairs

Taipei (Taiwan)

Design; Pavements; Pedestrians and Bicyclists

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2019 Paper #19-04653

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Dec 7 2018 9:48AM