Evalution measures for mobility and accessibility

This paper describes how guidance has been produced in recent years, not least by the Department for Transport in the UK (DfT 2003), to help engineers and planners make street environments more accessible for disabled people. However good and helpful this guidance may be, it is often the case that the engineer or planner is faced with a situation in which they cannot comply with the guidance – for example, maybe the available width for the footway is too narrow, or the gradients are too steep. They are therefore faced with the problem of what to do: fail to comply with the guidance in some respect? Do nothing? Making a compromise which inevitably means moving away from the ideal also means that it is possible that some people will lose out. It is necessary to confront the problem that the accessibility needs of different people might conflict. The study on which this paper is based is developing a methodology to measure and evaluate accessibility measures so that engineers, planners and disabled people can have a robust means of assessing the impacts of different design decisions – on what would work, who it would work for and, importantly, who would miss out as a result of the compromise. The paper has five further sections. The next section discusses the philosophical approach to addressing the problem of what is meant by a barrier and the way in which this has affected the approach to the research in the study. The following section describes the work undertaken in the laboratory in order to try to understand the problems which occur in the street in the light of this approach. The outcomes of the laboratory work are described in the subsequent section and Section 5 provides some initial interpretations of these outcomes and the implications for engineers, planners and disabled people. The last section draws some conclusions and suggests how this work will progress in the future.