Restrictions on Personal Vehicular Transport

4. Reaching the desired destination

Most of the special services for disabled people, and the improvements in accessibility to mainstream public transport, have developed over the last 15 years or so. Those developments reflect both acknowledgement that disabled people should not be put at a disadvantage by transport systems devised on the basis of the ability of non-disabled people to use them and recognition that an increasing number of people within our society have some degree of mobility impairment.

Clearly, these developments have produced a level of mobility for disabled people which is substantially better than that which existed, say, twenty years ago. But it should not be assumed that, because progress has been made, all that should be has been achieved. The systems and services described in Section 3 form a mosaic of what is required if disabled people are to have access to, roughly, the same level of personal mobility that non-disabled people have.

While all parts of that mosaic are of value, it should be remembered that the ability to travel by car is, and will remain, the single most important mode available to many disabled people. The importance of this mode can be illustrated in a number ofways: two should suffice.

The first is based on data from the OPCS national surveys of disability and, in Figure 1, shows modal use by disabled people.

From this graph it is apparent that (i) for any level of severity of disablement (1-2 is least severe, 9-10 most severe) car use is substantially higher than any other vehicular mode, and (ii) the diflference between car use and the use of other modes increases with the severity of disablement.

The second is based on data from the follow-up to the London Area Travel Survey (1991) in which over 2400 people with a mobility problem resulting from disability were interviewed about their travel and modal use. As Figure 2 shows 59 per cent of the vehicular journeys made by disabled people were by car, but for disabled people who used wheelchairs this percentage rose to 71. For the latter category of people, the next most important mode was "other bus", essentially special services provided by local authorities and health authorities which accounted for 17 per cent of their journeys. Among the generality of disabled people these special bus services only accounted for five per cent ofjourneys. Taxi journeys accounted for just under four per cent of journeys for both groups. Within the other vehicular modes category most of the wheelchair users journeys were on Dial-a-Ride, whereas for disabled people as a whole the higher proportion of other modes included Underground and rail, both little used by wheelchair users, as well as Dial-a-Ride.

Fig 1 Modes of transport used in the past year by severity of disablement: adults living in private households

Fig 2 Modal use by disabled people in London

London possesses a wide range of alternative and special services, with Dial-a-Ride in every area, Taxicard in almost every area and Community Transport in over half of the London Boroughs. Yet even with this wide range of accessible services, wheelchair users rely to a substantially greater extent than disabled people as whole on the use of the private car.

Of course it can be argued that the increase in fully accessible mainstream transport will lead to a reduction in the use of special services and private car and, indeed, to some extent this should happen, but the particular needs of more severely disabled people, especially those who have to use a wheelchair all the time, cannot be met even by enhanced public transport and special transport services.

The special services are limited in a number of ways. Dial-a-Ride, as perhaps the most widely available of this type of service:

• Usually operates five days a week, not six or seven
• Operates only for limited hours, typically 0900 to 1700 hours
• Requires advance booking, normally at least one day ahead sometimes more, so travelling on impulse is not possible
• Usually only available to people living within the operational area
• Covers only a limited geographical area, so making longer cross-boundary journeys dif~icult or impossible
• Is frequently supply constrained so that it is not always possible to book a journey
• Even though wide-spread is not universally available.

Taxicard services are only available in a relatively few urban areas (London, Edinburgh, Manchester for example) and are, again, subject to supply constraint, usually for financial reasons. Community Transport services are essentially for group, not individual travel, while other special services (such as voluntary car services, patient travel services) are either supply constrained and/or limited to providing a particular journey purpose.

This list of limitations is not intended to imply criticism of these special services. They perform a very valuable role in the mobility of disabled people, but inevitably a limited one. What they cannot do is to replicate the freedom of movement enjoyed by able-bodied people and which, for more severely disabled people, can only be achieved by the use of a car.

The much more localised (in a geographical sense) services such as Shopmobility and the Woking buggy senrice are, again, valuable parts of the mobility mosaic. But as the Automobile Association's report on Shopmobility notes, "Shopmobility is not a universal panacea for access to, and mobility in, town centres. It is just one of many services for people with impaired mobility". Some of the limitations of this service have already been mentioned in the previous section, at the heart of which is the fact that it does not - is not designed to - meet the needs of these people who cannot transfer from their own wheelchair into another.

The extension of fully accessible mainstream public transport services will undoubtedly enhance the mobility of many disabled people. To be effective it will have to be allied to improvements in the accessibility of the infrastructure, including Interchange facilities. However, by its nature, mainstream public transport is not a door-to-door service. To use it means, for non-disabled people, a walk to and from the bus stop, station or terminus. For them this is not a problem, but travelling a distance of two or three hundred metres (a fairly typical distance to a bus stop in a residential urban area) may well be very difficult, even impossible, for wheelchair users and for some ambulant disabled people. Problems for wheelchair users with travelling this sort of distance are exacerbated by bad weather, by steep gradients and by poorly designed infrastructure, just as they are also for people with severe walking difficulties.

Maintenance of the pedestrian environment is also important. People with mobility problems are very susceptible to poorly maintained footways. Uneven or broken paving slabs, ruts and poor reinstatements cause wheelchairs to jolt, trap small wheels, snag canes and trip the unwary. Highway authorities, when making grant submissions, should be required to show that they are maintaining the pedestrian environment in a sumciently good condition to enable disabled people to move safely and easily.

Weather conditions can have a far greater adverse effect on disabled people than on their able-bodied peers. In hot weather, people with spinal injuries and others may face the serious risk of over-heating. In cold weather, people who have polio, and others with loss of muscle bulk, can suffer further disablement as a result of the cold knocking further muscles out of action. It is not easy for anyone in a wheelchair to dress up adequately to combat the wind, rain and cold that are a feature of our climate. Similar arguments apply to ambulant disabled people, all leading towards further restriction of movement and of mobility.

A second point, which has to be borne in mind, is the time it will take to achieve finally accessible mainstream public transport. For taxis it is likely to be 15 years, for buses 20 years, for trains rather more than that. Practical cost and resource considerations militate against swifter changes than these, but it may well be that restrictions on private car use are brought in on a much shorter timescale. If this happens, as seems likely, those disabled people with a real need to use cars would suffer a double blow to their mobility.

Updated: 9 November 2000

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