Application for a barrier free tourism in Valencia

Abstract

Barrier free tourism is increasingly getting a greater attention by the tourist industry, not just for the added value given to the touristic experience, but because of the difference and specialization on a wide market share that the Spanish touristic sector has not been able to fully take advantage of yet. Following this idea, the National Plan for Smart cities (Plan Nacional de Ciudades Inteligentes) stands up for smart touristic destinations where innovative technologies should play an important role to improve accessibility. The development of the mobile phone App “Barrier Free-Valencia” intents to offer a useful tool to walk through the city of Valencia guaranteeing a 100% barrier free route. The methodology used for the development is based on the combination of a systematic field work, using free access information provided by the Municipality of Valencia, and calculations based on the Dijkstra algorithm (1959) implemented on a GIS software. To calculate the route, it is used the impedance or crossing difficulty concept where the different urban barriers and low comfort situation areas are identified. The main data used are: presence of lower sidewalks, path narrowing, slopes, steps and noisy pavement. After this data has been identified, the routes are divided into accessible, passable, and not accessible. It is necessary to work on the idea of creating representative single line grids of sidewalks and, therefore, of real paths followed by urban citizens. By doing so, more data can be collected to build a complete Smart City grid. The development of Apps such as Barrier Free will help on the evolution towards more inclusive cities. An idea that is the basic line of our investigation.