Revolutionizing ADA Compliance: Harnessing GIS for Streamlined Reporting

Since 1992, public entities with 50 or more employees that must undertake structural changes to achieve program accessibility have been required under ADA Title II to develop a transition plan. HIGH The Department of Justice's Title II regulation required those entities to develop the plan within six months of January 26, 1992, and required necessary structural changes to be completed as expeditiously as possible, generally within three years. For entities responsible for streets, roads or walkways, the plan must include a schedule for providing curb ramps or other sloped areas where pedestrian walkways cross curbs. The plan must identify physical obstacles, describe the methods to be used to make facilities accessible, set a schedule, and name the official responsible. Interested persons — including individuals with disabilities and organizations representing them — must be given an opportunity to participate.

As one panelist put it during the Q&A: "the deadline was technically '92. So the time defense has run out."

Three and a half decades later, the binding constraint is not the law. It is measurement. ADA compliance is not a mapping exercise — it is a metrology exercise conducted across a national asset base at a tolerance most field crews cannot reliably hit. A curb ramp cross slope must not exceed 1:48, or roughly 2.08 percent. HIGH Ramps are torn out for being a tenth of a percent over. And the standard field instrument for measuring that — a digital level laid on a concrete panel — can produce materially different answers across operators and placements.

That is the thread running through all four presentations in this session.

The four presenters converged on this from different directions. Smilovsky framed it as evidentiary: data collected with survey-grade instrumentation carries metadata and is "going to be able to honestly stand up in a court of law." Yates framed it as programmatic: a paper or digital checklist cannot be converted into a curb ramp retrofit program, so agencies that inspect by checklist end up collecting the same data twice. Tippman framed it as commercial: without an exact defect count, a five-year phased repair program cannot be priced, and every bid in the market is a guess.

The regulatory picture is shifting underneath local governments. The U.S. Access Board issued the final rule on the Public Right-of-Way Accessibility Guidelines (PROWAG) in August 2023. HIGH GSA adopted PROWAG into enforceable standards for facilities covered by its regulations in July 2024. The Department of Transportation adopted PROWAG requirements on December 18, 2024, effective January 17, 2025, for new construction and alterations of transit stops in the public right-of-way. HIGH The Department of Justice has not adopted PROWAG wholesale as the general enforceable Title II standard for all public rights-of-way. For non-transit pedestrian facilities — including ordinary curb ramps, sidewalks, pedestrian signals and accessible detours — PROWAG provides authoritative technical guidance, but its provisions are not universally enforceable under Title II merely by virtue of the Access Board's rule. HIGH

Regulatory status checked: September 2026.

Agencies are therefore building inventories during a window in which the technical criteria are known, published, and widely treated as best practice, but not yet uniformly enforceable. The practical implication raised repeatedly in the Q&A: build the inventory in a form that can be re-evaluated against a changed standard without recollecting the field data.

Enforcement is not primarily proactive. Panelists identified three live mechanisms:

And a fourth, increasingly: state DOTs. Panelists noted Oregon and Washington leading on both support and enforcement, Texas operating to a deadline of uncertain force, Illinois still determining its posture, and California characterized simply as "super weird." EMERGING

Smilovsky worked the national number from first principles:

The presentation's central correction: ADA asset capture is not "put it on a map." Compliance requires running slope, cross slope, width, direction of travel, landing geometry, flare geometry, detectable warning condition, and — for pedestrian push buttons — actuation force. These are dimensional and force measurements at engineering tolerance, captured across a network asset.

The cross slope limit of approximately 2 percent was singled out as the hard one. "That's a hard number to reach."

Funding consequence, as stated: absence of a transition plan puts federal funding at risk, including highway funding. MODERATE

Smilovsky's own study, conducted roughly seven to eight years prior in the context of the City of Tucson ADA transition plan — a job he sized at roughly 3,000–4,000 miles of data collection:

He extended it to a demonstration any attendee can run: place a digital level on a kitchen table in ten different positions. Ten different answers.

The Tucson work required proving that vehicle-mounted lidar could match or beat traditional methods. The finding: by narrowing the cross-section to a single laser layer, the repeatability of the two points on the curb was, 99 percent of the time, better than a person returning to the same panel with a digital level. EMERGING

The operational point, restated in the Q&A: because high-accuracy GNSS delivers a highly repeatable measurement, even where the absolute position is slightly offset, the delta between two points remains recoverable. That delta is the slope.

Smilovsky explicitly warned that shooting GPS alone for sidewalk slope measurement can be dangerous, and that the sweet spot is GNSS coupled with a reality-capture method — photogrammetry or lidar. For locating and re-locating trip hazards, as in the contractor use case, GNSS alone is well suited.

Bad Elf: approximately 15 years in high-accuracy GNSS; Bluetooth-connected bring-your-own-device model across iOS, Android and Windows; Esri Gold Partner; GISCI Endorsing Company; available on GSA. Stated capability: Bad Elf Flex Mini Extreme at 2 cm or better for approximately $1,500 before government discount. Pricing and capability as stated on September 10, 2025; verify current details directly with the vendor. Exclusive partnership with Pix4D for photogrammetry and lidar processing. Enablement includes custom in-person training — a City of Tempe deployment across approximately 19 departments was cited — and an online LMS. INDUSTRY-REPORTED

A field video showed a Bad Elf GNSS receiver paired with an iPad on an ADA project in San Antonio, Texas.

Engineering Mapping Solutions: approximately 30 years in business (founded 1995), Phoenix, Arizona. Pure-play GIS. Began in wet utilities — water, sewer, storm — and migrated into general asset collection. Esri developer and business partner. Stated goal: build accurate GIS that is functional, scalable, available, cost-efficient, and deployed through web solutions.

The consequence is a staffing one: it removes the requirement for top-dollar personnel in the field. The field crew's job becomes efficient, cost-effective capture of raw data.

Reported throughput from a 2020 project: approximately 80 sub-centimeter GPS survey points per hour. INDUSTRY-REPORTED

Phil offered to share the full method in detail with webinar attendees. EMERGING

Validation approach: lines were drawn on a physical ramp, the ramp was scanned, and the point-cloud-derived measurements were cross-verified against field measurements taken on the same ramp. Measurement positions were named — left approach, top, mid, bottom. Custom Python tools in QGIS allowed two arbitrary points to be picked in XYZ space and the geometry between them computed.

A test area in Chandler, Arizona captured ramps and sidewalk plus curb and gutter, paint striping and other roadside features. The stated rule: anything visible in the collected imagery can be captured. Front and rear imagery both retained; resolution sufficient to support sidewalk condition assessment on zoom.

From the Q&A. Esri refers to 360° imagery as oriented imagery — the search term Phil offered attendees. EMS also embeds a JavaScript photosphere viewer in its own applications, which works on mobile.

Illustrative non-ADA application: a cemetery in Carefree, Arizona used ground-penetrating radar to locate caskets; EMS walked a grid pattern with the 360 camera rather than flying a drone, and delivered the result in an Experience Builder web app.

Phil applied this to himself on air, concluding that he would rather pay DeepWalk to collect and analyze than continue building the capability internally — while noting that the consultant's role on the front end and back end remains essential.

Public entities with 50 or more employees that must undertake structural changes to achieve program accessibility are required to develop a transition plan. The separate Title II self-evaluation requirement directs public entities to review their services, policies and practices and identify necessary modifications. For sidewalk programs, that review can include inspecting the network, identifying access barriers and creating a plan to address what was found. Failure to meet applicable obligations can expose an entity to complaints, enforcement or litigation.

Yates's argument is that the industry focuses on the slowest-looking step — measuring slopes, widths and areas — and underweights everything around it:

DeepWalk was founded in 2021 to close that gap.

DeepWalk states its output outperforms placing a smart level down twice on every panel. INDUSTRY-REPORTED

Equally important, and stated unprompted: DeepWalk does not do post-construction validation. The product is scoped to sidewalk planning, ADA transition plans and work order generation. "If you're installing a brand new curb ramp, your construction inspectors — their jobs are safe." This is the distinction between planning-grade and acceptance-grade measurement, and it maps directly onto Smilovsky's absolute-vs-relative framing.

A manual tagging system allows collectors to capture fields the automated pipeline does not, via a crosshair-and-button interaction in the app.

A small community with no GIS staff, which needs to manage sidewalk programs without GIS expertise in-house.

Trip hazard removal program workflow as demonstrated:

Genoa runs this annually and is also building remove-and-replace and vegetation removal programs. It publishes its sidewalk work publicly on its municipal website — which, as Yates put it, means that when the Department of Justice asks what the town is doing about its sidewalks, "they just send them a link."

Launched shortly before the session. Select and filter curb ramps — for example, along a planned resurfacing corridor — and the system presents a top-down view of each ramp with per-panel slopes. The reviewer applies engineering judgment ramp by ramp against the specific project's replacement criteria, then exports the resulting program as Excel, GeoJSON or other formats. Positioned for scoping, on the premise that most curb ramps are replaced alongside other projects.

Also offered: iPhone rental (used by approximately half of customers, billed weekly, scalable to ~10 phones on a week's notice) and GNSS receiver rental, recently switched to Bad Elf units. Stated rationale for the receivers: iPhone GPS performs well in open suburban conditions but poorly in dense urban and wooded areas — "in downtown Chicago, where we're based, you need one of these units."

Three engagement formats: internal staff collection, DeepWalk-supplied collectors, or a full transition planning service through an engineering firm partner.

This presentation is the one most likely to be undervalued by a GIS audience. It is the only account in the session of what happens to the data after the compliance program is written.

Concrete leveling. Grinding, foam jacking, mudjacking, helical piering for structural lifting. Residential, commercial, municipal and industrial. Trip hazard removal and ADA compliance is a substantial share of the work. Market includes the City of Fort Wayne — right-of-way, street, bridge, Fort Wayne Community Schools, and parks and recreation departments — and the City of New Haven, Indiana.

Self-described as "a concrete leveling company... not a technology company." Adopted GIS approximately five years prior, initially found it above the company's realm, then adopted Bad Elf.

An HOA engaged the company to mark trip hazards across a private-walk network — walks behind houses and around a golf course, distinct from the city streets the firm also services.

What the exact number made possible:

The deliverable was a KML/KMZ file emailed to the association, which board members opened directly in Google Earth during their meeting. On that map, distinguished by symbology:

An area within the development, "Rocket Hill," was used to demonstrate completed versus outstanding work.

A field-observed deterioration pattern worth capturing, because it produces defects that inventories built from geometry alone will classify incorrectly.

Truncated domes (detectable warning surfaces — the raised-dome panels at ramp landings) are installed in three common ways. One is a bolt-down mat set into wet concrete, designed so it can be pulled and replaced if damaged by, for example, a snow plow. The observed problem: these mats were preventing the concrete beneath from off-gassing and curing properly. Depending on when and how they were set, the substrate beneath was found to break down — described as a sandy, gritty texture — requiring replacement. The firm now maps where truncated domes need replacement. EMERGING

Beyond the public right-of-way, the same mapping approach is used across large shopping centers and managed properties: signage, stop signs, accessible parking stalls, van-accessible ratios, and anything requiring update. The map keeps the owner aligned with what needs to be addressed.

The operational failure mode described: a right-of-way or street department issues work as a list of addresses or cross-street segments. The crew is aiming at a section of sidewalk within a one-block area — but there is frequently an adjacent defect around the corner, such as a tree-lifted panel requiring adjacent panels to be lifted. With mapped work, the completed adjacent work is recorded, the next department to open the file can see it, and the address-based gaps close.

And on the municipal IT side: the data exists, but "it is no... comprehendable to guys in the field." The map is the translation layer between the GIS department's system of record and the crew on the truck.

Ten sessions covering compliance and asset management across ADA, stormwater, parks, wastewater, urban forestry, subsurface utilities, emergency planning and enterprise asset management. Browse the full archive at AssetMapping.Events.