Bolt launches initiative using its scooters to map cities for wheelchair users and improve mobility

Bolt, the European shared mobility platform, today launched Wheels4Wheels, a project that gives wheelchair users reliable, street-level information about whether a route is actually passable. Built to reduce the everyday barriers wheelchair users face when navigating cities, it repurposes sensors already fitted to Bolt’s scooters to collect the accessibility data that mainstream maps have long been missing, and publishes it openly so that any navigation service, city authority, or developer can use it immediately and for free.

Around 80 million people worldwide rely on a wheelchair to get around. Mainstream navigation apps can route users around steps, but cannot tell them whether a pavement is cobblestone, whether a kerb has a dropped edge, or whether a path ends abruptly mid-street. These are the details that determine if a journey is actually possible, and they are absent from every major map in use today.

“Being in a wheelchair trains you for the unexpected,” said accessibility advocate Hendra Raud from Tallinn, Estonia. “Cobblestone makes your entire body ache, and not having a ramp can mess up your entire schedule. You feel frustrated. So it’s a great feeling to finally have a map of the world the way we actually experience it.”

Bolt’s scooters are already equipped with accelerometers, gyroscopes, GPS receivers, and cameras, installed originally to support vehicle safety and maintenance. The Wheels4Wheels project reads the vibrations a scooter records as it travels and uses them to give each street a score on a five-point scale, ranging from smooth and fully passable to terrain a wheelchair cannot cross. Multiple rides on the same street increase confidence even further.

In the Tallinn pilot, Bolt scooters covered 550 km across all eight city districts, capturing 40.5 million accelerometer readings and producing 66,088 individual surface ratings, with manual mapping conducted in parallel to validate the method. As a result, recorded surface-quality information across Tallinn increased by 26%.

“Every year, our scooters cover millions of kilometres across hundreds of cities, registering every bump, slope, and uneven surface along the way,” said Ardo Reinsalu, Director of Vehicles at Bolt. “We have long shared that data with city partners to help improve roads and pavements for everyone. Wheels4Wheels takes that a step further by making the same information available directly to the people who need it most. It also changes how we think about scooters themselves, as something that goes beyond getting people around and actively helps make cities more accessible for everyone.”

Bolt operates more than 230,000 scooters across more than 270 cities worldwide, generating millions of data points every day. The full Wheels4Wheels pipeline is released as open-source software under an MIT licence, meaning any city, developer, or organisation can access, run, and adapt it freely, without additional hardware or infrastructure. Data is published openly to OpenStreetMap, the worlds’ largest open-source map database, from where it’s automatically integrated into apps that support surface-based routing, and can be used by developers including Apple and Microsoft to power apps used by more than 1 billion people.