Via Community News Service, a University of Vermont journalism internship, on assignment for the Vermont Community Newspaper Group
You may have seen a handful of electric scooters rolling down South Burlington sidewalks this past week. Those scooters belong to StreetScan, a company the city enlisted to see how sidewalks are doing — with the goal of fixing broken ones and making them safer to use.
Officials hired the company in August to lead a citywide survey of South Burlington’s sidewalks and shared-use paths that started Oct. 10. With that data, the company is set to rate the condition of every concrete panel and more. In total, the sidewalk assessment and management of paths and ramps was pegged at $21,400, according to city records.
The scooter work was set to end after a week or so, Department of Public Works Deputy Director of Capital Projects Erica Quallen told Town Meeting TV this month. By next spring or summer, the city will use the data put together by StreetScan to plan for improvements over the next five to 10 years, Quallen said.
In 2022, South Burlington released an updated climate action plan, hoping to make the city greener and by 2030 bring emissions 60 percent below 2019 levels. The plan aims to significantly decrease greenhouse gas emissions, and what better way to do that, the thinking went, than to get more people walking by improving the sidewalks?
South Burlington has increased its sidewalk maintenance budget from $2,000 to $40,000 for the 2025 fiscal year and intends to start construction on new sidewalks, push-to-walk buttons and a pedestrian-bicycle bridge.
But officials see improving the over 50 miles of existing sidewalks in the city as just as important as building new ones, and that’s where StreetScan comes in.
“Our crews are going to essentially go around collecting a lot of data on all the various different defects that they’re going to encounter,” CEO Jon-Erik Dillon said. “All that data then gets processed and formulated into a sidewalk condition index, so that the municipality can then have a scoring and rating system to know which sidewalks are worse than others, what types of issues are present on each of the sidewalks and then recommendations on how to address that.”
The scooters feature an attached camera to collect video imagery to find sidewalk defects, which could look like missing or broken slabs, tripping hazards, cracks or uplifts — bouts of rising concrete from tree roots or other obstacles.
Would South Burlington pedestrians appear in the scooter video data?
“I mean, you’d get their legs or feet, but predominantly the camera is kind of steered toward the sidewalk,” Dillon said.
The company analyzes videos to put every stretch of sidewalk on a severity index from zero to 100, ranking the condition of each. That data is meant to help city officials create a plan of attack for keeping pedestrians safe and encouraging more people to walk instead of drive.
Typically, SafeScan is hired to analyze both roads and sidewalks to assess accessibility, its CEO said.
“Most of the reason for doing sidewalks across the U.S these days is more ADA compliance, so it’s the American Disability Act,” Dillon said. “It’s ensuring that sidewalks and infrastructure are able to handle anybody with a disability. So, identifying areas that are not up to code.”
Though Dillon’s company is usually hired for ADA compliance, he assures South Burlington residents that this StreetScan project will operate just like the others: “zero disruption at all” to everyday life.
“We don’t close any of the sidewalks or infrastructure,” he said. “They’ll just be zipping around, collecting data, and ultimately what the residents can expect with the outcome of this data is the city is going to have a better understanding of the state of the infrastructure, what kind of funding they require, you know, to address those issues moving forward.”
This week is one of StreetScan’s first times in Vermont. Dillon is excited to be working in a new area and is confident that his scooters will get South Burlington the data it needs.
“We’ve been in many projects elsewhere, but the benefit of sidewalks is they all look pretty much the same,” he said through a laugh. “So going from one state to the next, we’re pretty good.”