A barrier a city cannot see stays a barrier. A cracked curb ramp that never enters a database never enters a work order, and someone in a wheelchair meets it every single day until it does. CAW exists to close that gap: current, on-foot evidence of how the public realm actually is, so cities can fix what matters and prove the progress they are required to make.
Every unmeasured defect in the pedestrian realm is a decision someone else is forced to make: take the long way, take the risk, or stay home.
For a wheelchair user, a single non-compliant corner can sever an entire route to the bus stop, the clinic, the grocery store. The rest of the block being perfect doesn't matter. Accessibility fails at its weakest point, which is why it has to be measured point by point, on the ground.
Falls are a leading cause of injury for older adults, and uneven pavement is a leading cause of falls. When the sidewalk can't be trusted, people stop using it, and the neighbourhood quietly loses the very residents public space is meant to serve.
Transit is only as accessible as the path to it. A blocked or broken stretch between someone's door and the stop undoes every dollar invested in the accessible bus that arrives there. Whoever measures that last hundred metres measures whether the system actually works.
Under the Accessible British Columbia Act, every municipality is required to identify and remove barriers in its built environment, and to keep that work current. Identification is the step CAW industrializes: a standing, photographic, locatable record of the barriers, instead of an occasional manual audit.
WHY BC · THE REGULATORY FLOOR THAT MAKES BARRIER DATA A STANDING NEEDUN Sustainable Development Goal 11 commits cities to becoming inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable, and its indicators require knowing whether public space is genuinely accessible. The UN's own indicator methodology names the weakness: mapped and crowd-sourced geodata can only identify potential public space; confirming what is actually there, and actually accessible, requires validation on the ground.
Universal access to safe, inclusive and accessible public spaces, in particular for women and children, older persons and persons with disabilities. CAW's capture is the on-ground validation layer this target's indicator explicitly calls for: not whether a space exists on a map, but whether a person with a disability can actually use it today.
Accessible, sustainable transport systems for all, with special attention to persons with disabilities and older persons. CAW measures the last hundred metres, the sidewalk, the crossing, the curb ramp, the stop itself, that determine whether accessible transit is accessible in practice.
Inclusive urbanization with participatory planning and management. CAW is residents documenting their own neighbourhoods, compensated, structured, and feeding directly into the evidence cities plan with. Community data collection is not a byproduct of the model. It is the model.
Cities increasingly report against localized SDG indicators, and several publish dedicated SDG 11 data platforms. For those cities, CAW is not a values statement. It is a data source for the report they already have to write.
Barrier data is inequality data. Surfacing where the built environment excludes people, and getting it fixed, is one of the most concrete forms of inclusion a city can deliver.
Well-maintained pedestrian environments mean more walking, fewer falls, fewer injuries. The sidewalk is public health infrastructure, and its condition is a health variable.
CAW is architected to generate exactly the ground-truth accessibility data these targets require and currently lack. That is the claim we make, and we choose the words deliberately. Our capture network is early: first zones, first routes, first spotters. We will say CAW is advancing SDG 11 when there is captured evidence and a city acting on it, and not before. If you work on these problems, in a municipality, a transit agency, or a research group, that is exactly the stage at which your input shapes what gets built.