Manatee County Uses ArcGIS to Close Sidewalk Gaps

Manatee County, in western Florida, has more than 2,700 miles of constructed sidewalk. Until recently, the county did not have a reliable way to identify where sidewalk gaps existed, which gaps posed the greatest safety risk, or which should be fixed first. The county’s Traffic Engineering division launched a GIS initiative to map and prioritize gaps countywide. Olivia Andrews, a GIS analyst with the Manatee County Public Works Department, inherited the effort and developed it into a working system used across the department.

The need grew from rapid development. Roads that once served rural and agricultural areas now connect neighborhoods, schools, businesses, and other destinations that generate pedestrian traffic. As development expanded, local regulations encouraged sidewalk construction, creating a need to take stock of existing infrastructure and plan new investments with better spatial data.

The initial sidewalk data collection process combined traditional engineering tools, measuring wheels, and a web app hosted on the county’s Esri portal so engineers could enter information in real time from their devices. In ArcGIS Pro, Andrews built maps of Manatee County’s existing sidewalk network and a separate layer documenting sidewalk gaps, defined as places where a continuous walking surface is absent and pedestrians may be forced into the street or across uneven terrain.

The inventory captured attributes such as accessibility compliance status, sidewalk width, surface condition, and whether a utility strip was present between the sidewalk and the curb.

“Olivia’s work was crucial in translating the technical prioritization framework into a spatial GIS format that can be updated as community needs evolve,” said Agasteena Patel, transportation planner with Manatee County Public Works. “This framework makes it much easier to identify projects for implementation.”

A key decision was simplifying the prioritization framework. The original scoring model used eight parameters, making it too complex to establish a useful baseline. Guided by project engineers, Andrews reduced the model to four safety parameters: locations within one mile of schools, parks, and libraries, plus pedestrian crash data recorded near sidewalk gap locations.

The simplified model aligned with a Florida statute requiring safe walking routes within a two-mile radius of schools. By focusing on pedestrian crashes near gaps and missing walking routes to key destinations, the team identified the highest-priority segments for investment. The scoring process quickly surfaced sidewalk gaps with the highest combined safety and constructability scores as top construction candidates.

As the project expanded beyond Traffic Engineering, fragmented data layers made ownership and source tracking difficult. Andrews became a liaison between the Public Works GIS team and Traffic Engineering, translating GIS needs for engineers and engineering priorities for GIS staff. She consolidated scattered layers into a single primary layer for existing sidewalk data and sidewalk gap data, eliminating duplicate layers that could not be traced to a source.

The primary layer is hosted on the county’s ArcGIS Enterprise portal, where Andrews created views to control which web maps and editing groups could access specific data. In ArcGIS Dashboards, she also built a dashboard showing project phases, mileage totals for existing sidewalks and sidewalk gaps, and prioritization scores. The dashboard updates automatically as engineers make edits during in-person site surveys. Andrews also created a story in ArcGIS StoryMaps to trace the project’s development and compiled resources on an ArcGIS Hub site so department staff could find data in one place.

The workflow required no significant new technology investment—only an organizational commitment to integrating GIS into the process. Others in the department recognized the value of turning a technical prioritization framework into a spatial system that can evolve with community needs.

Completing a countywide sidewalk inventory remains a long-term undertaking. Manatee County plans annual data collection reviews to account for new construction and is evaluating external vendors to extend coverage beyond thoroughfare roads. In the meantime, the framework helps the county put limited resources toward gaps that pose the greatest risk, backed by spatial data that had not existed before.