Why “Accessible” Transport Will Continue to Fail People with Disabilities
Key Takeaways
- Almost every transport strategy commits to meeting the needs of people with disabilities, but most fail when it comes to delivery.
- Accessibility legislation has often come with little or no extra funding, making it more about virtue signalling than real change.
- Even if every accessibility law were fully met, transport would still fail many people with disabilities.
- Being compliant isn’t the same as being usable: an accessible bus stop is of little value if the bus rarely comes.
- A transport system is only truly accessible when people with disabilities can make the journeys they choose, at the time they choose, with dignity and without having to plan around avoidable failure.
- Service frequency and coverage matter as much as accessible infrastructure and fleet.
- People with disabilities are often among the most reliant on public transport.
- Redirecting the heavy subsidies we give motor vehicles would fund better public transport and benefit people with disabilities enormously.
- Poor footpaths, painted cycle lanes and crossings timed for cars can make otherwise accessible journeys impossible.
- Autonomous vehicles could be transformative for many people with disabilities.
What Next?
Do you know how people with disabilities are impacted by inadequate infrastructure and services?
Introduction
This week, I’m continuing my series looking at our transport systems through different lenses. Previously I’ve looked at them from a range of perspectives, including the economy, the environment and poverty. This week, it’s the turn of people with disabilities.
As with those earlier lenses, our current transport systems don’t come out of this well.
On paper, things look promising. Almost every transport strategy commits to meeting the needs of people with disabilities, and in many countries accessibility is now written into law. New buses, trains and stations have to be accessible, and older ones are gradually being retrofitted. Politicians are quick to point to this as proof of progress.
But there’s a problem. Even if every one of those legal requirements were fully met tomorrow, transport would still fail many people with disabilities. That’s because we’ve been asking the wrong question. We’ve been asking whether a vehicle or a station is accessible, when we should be asking whether a person with a disability can actually get where they need to go, when they need to go, with dignity.
Those are two very different questions, and the gap between them is where our transport systems keep falling short.
To see why, it helps to look at how transport policy for people with disabilities has evolved, and where it has stalled.
The Evolution of Transport Policies for People with Disabilities
Over the decades, the way transport systems treat people with disabilities has evolved in roughly five phases.
Phase 1: Ignorance
At first, the issue is largely ignored. There is little or no provision for people who can’t use stairs, who are blind or have low vision, or who have other disabilities. Much of the infrastructure we still rely on today was built during this phase. That is why so much of it remains inaccessible and is only slowly being fixed.
Phase 2: Patchy Awareness
Some places start to recognise the gap and add ramps, lifts, kerb ramps and similar features. It’s progress, but it’s inconsistent and often depends on who happens to be in charge.
Phase 3: Widespread Awareness
Designing for people with disabilities becomes the norm almost everywhere. New infrastructure and fleet are designed with accessibility in mind, staff are trained to assist, and existing infrastructure begins to be retrofitted. It’s far from perfect, but the direction of travel is clear.
Phase 4: Legislated Compliance for Infrastructure and Fleet
Accessibility becomes a legal requirement. All new infrastructure and fleet must be accessible, and existing assets must be upgraded, usually by a set deadline.
In practice, this often changed less than you might expect. The legislation usually came with little or no additional funding, and most places were already making slow progress under Phase 3. In some cases, it was not much more than virtue signalling.
Phase 5: Legislated Compliance for End-to-End Journeys
Governments start to look beyond the vehicles and stations themselves. They ask whether the whole journey is accessible, including whether people can actually get to the station or bus stop in the first place.
Most jurisdictions in the Global North are now somewhere between Phases 4 and 5. Politicians are quick to use these legislative requirements to show how much they are doing for people with disabilities. But they miss something important: even if every requirement is fully met, transport will still be inadequate for many people with disabilities.
Let me explain why.
Accessible Isn’t the Same as Usable
Imagine a world where every public transport service is fully accessible. Every bus stop has kerb ramps, seating and shelter. Every station has ramps or lifts, tactile paving and clear audio and visual information. Every bus, train and tram is fully accessible too.
Sounds perfect, doesn’t it? It would certainly be a big improvement on today. But it still has a major flaw.
To see it, we need to be clear about what our transport systems should actually be delivering for people with disabilities. Here’s my attempt at a definition:
A transport system is accessible only when a person with a disability can make the journeys they choose, at the time they choose, with dignity and without needing to plan around avoidable failure.
Accessible infrastructure and fleet are an essential part of this. But the real challenge sits in the words “the journeys they choose, at the time they choose.” That isn’t only about hard infrastructure. It’s about services.
A perfectly accessible bus stop is of little use if the bus comes once an hour, stops running at 7pm, or doesn’t go anywhere you need to be. As I discussed in my recent blog on poverty, the quality of public transport in many areas is wholly inadequate. For people who rely on it, that decides which jobs they can take, which appointments they can keep and how much of a social life they can have.
People with disabilities are often among the most reliant on public transport. As populations age in many countries, more people will lose the ability to drive and need alternatives.
It’s also worth remembering that disability covers far more than wheelchairs and white canes. It includes sensory, cognitive, intellectual and psychosocial disabilities, as well as invisible ones such as chronic pain and fatigue. For many people, the biggest barriers aren’t ramps and lifts. They are confusing wayfinding, unreliable or inaccessible real-time information, crowded and noisy vehicles, staff who don’t know how to help, and the anxiety of not knowing whether the lift will be working when you arrive. That is what “with dignity and without needing to plan around avoidable failure” is really about.
Now, it’s easy for me to sit here writing a blog about how we should have turn-up-and-go public transport that is fully accessible to everyone. The bean counters will rightly respond that we can’t afford it.
Within our current paradigm, they’re right. But that paradigm is a choice. By default, we heavily subsidise motor vehicles, by around 50% of their cost depending on where you live (see here).
If we stopped doing that, public transport would benefit twice over. There would be more money to improve and expand services, and more people would switch to public transport. With a sensible fare policy, that would increase fare revenue too, paying for even more expansion.
All of this would massively benefit people with disabilities.
But services are only part of the story. To make journeys work from end to end, we also need to get another part of the transport system right: active transport infrastructure.
Active Transport Infrastructure
In many places around the world, walking and cycling infrastructure is inadequate even for people without disabilities. Put someone in a wheelchair or on a mobility scooter, or take away their sight, and those failings become far more serious.
A kerb ramp is great, but not much use if the footpath around it is cracked, uneven, too narrow or blocked by parked cars, bins and signposts. A single missing link can make a whole journey impossible, and it’s often the stretch between the front door and the bus stop.
Cycling infrastructure matters too, and more than people tend to realise. For many of the mobility devices now available, from mobility scooters to adapted bikes and trikes, a high-quality, physically separated cycle lane is often the safest and most practical place to travel. That only works where such a lane exists. A strip of paint on the road isn’t going to cut the mustard.
Then there are pedestrian crossings. Signal timings are typically set to keep motor vehicles moving, not to give people enough time to cross. Anyone who walks more slowly, whether because of a disability, age, or simply carrying shopping or pushing a pram, can still find themselves in the middle of the road when the lights change. Once again, priority goes to vehicles rather than people.
Fixing these problems would benefit far more people than just those with disabilities. Better public and active transport would also deliver gains for the environment, population health and people on low incomes. But we won’t get there by pretending all we need to do is make buses, trains and trams accessible.
However, something could make an even bigger difference for many people with disabilities than better public and active transport, and it makes supporters of walking, cycling, and public transport, like me, uncomfortable: autonomy.
Autonomy
For some people with disabilities, robotaxis are already proving to be a better option than human-driven services. People with guide dogs, for example, are routinely turned away by taxi and rideshare drivers, even though this is usually illegal. A driverless vehicle doesn’t refuse a passenger because of their dog.
But the real game-changer would come if, or when, personally owned autonomous vehicles become a reality. They don’t exist yet, and it’s unclear when they will. Tesla has been a year away from delivering them for about a decade. Perhaps building a flying car has been a distraction 🙂.
If they do arrive, the impact for people with disabilities is easy to imagine. Most of the population takes access to a car for granted. Many people who are blind or have low vision, have epilepsy, or have certain cognitive or physical disabilities have never had that option. Autonomy could give it to them.
For many trips, this would be more compelling than even very good public transport with fully accessible stations and stops. It would open up far more job opportunities than many people with disabilities can currently reach, along with education, healthcare and social connections, delivering substantial welfare gains. It may well be the strongest argument there is for autonomous vehicles.
I’ll admit this conclusion is uncomfortable for someone like me. I spend much of my time arguing that we need fewer cars, not more, and that car dependence increases poverty, sprawl, congestion, emissions and road danger. Autonomous vehicles risk making all of those worse if they simply encourage more and longer car trips. But it would be dishonest to ignore the fact that, for many people with disabilities, a vehicle that drives itself could offer a level of independence that no bus, train or footpath ever will. If we are serious about the journeys they choose, at the time they choose, we can’t dismiss that.
Autonomy isn’t limited to cars, either. Autonomous micromobility devices, such as self-driving wheelchairs and mobility scooters, are also being developed. These could provide options for people with disabilities that don’t require an autonomous car at all.
AVs also have real downsides for the wider transport system, most obviously more motor vehicles on our roads. But if we get the regulation of autonomous vehicles right, we should be able to free up more than enough road space by moving more people onto space-efficient modes, while still delivering the benefits AVs could offer people with disabilities.
Conclusion
Most transport strategies say all the right things about people with disabilities. The goals are laudable, and the legislation makes everyone feel warm and fuzzy. But too often it is about the vibes rather than delivery. Without proper analysis, costing or funding, it falls short where it matters.
The core problem is that we have confused “compliant” with “usable.” A fully accessible bus stop doesn’t help much if the bus only comes once an hour. Ticking the infrastructure and fleet boxes is necessary, but nowhere near enough.
If we take the definition I proposed seriously: "that a person with a disability can make the journeys they choose, at the time they choose, with dignity and without having to plan around avoidable failure", it becomes a question about the whole transport system. How frequent are our services? How good is our walking and cycling infrastructure? And whose time do we prioritise at the traffic lights?
The answers to those questions come back to the same place they did when we looked at the environment and poverty: how we choose to spend our money. As long as we keep heavily subsidising motor vehicles, the bean counters will be right that we can’t afford the public and active transport systems people with disabilities need. Change that, and the maths looks very different.
Personally owned autonomous vehicles may eventually be the most transformative option of all for many people with disabilities. They could finally offer access to a mode of transport most of us take for granted. But they are not here yet. In the meantime, the things that would help people with disabilities the most are the same things that would help almost everyone else: better services, better streets and a better allocation of space and money.
