Restrictions on Personal Vehicular Transport

5. Resolving conflicts

The discussion of the various modes of transport now available serves to show how much progress has been made in recent years. Current ideas about the need to reduce reliance on private transport are not, of course, new; they have been discussed in one way or another for many years. What is new is an apparent intention by government to do something positive, rather than just talk about it.

Implementation of some or even all of the ideas for limiting private car use does in some degree conflict with policies that seek to improve the mobility of disabled people. Essentially that conflict arises because able-bodied people and, increasingly people with less severe disabilities, have a range of travel alternatives whereas, as shown in Section 4, more severely disabled people do not.

Given that there are very good reasons for more physical and financial restrictions on car use in general, it is most important that these policies should not lose sight of the needs of more severely disabled people. This is not an argument for special treatment per se, but rather for equal outcome in terms of personal mobility.

It is also important not to get this issue out of proportion. Many within the six million plus disabled people will be able to cope with restrictions on private car use because they will have increasingly good access to the range of public and special services mentioned above: they will have usable alternatives.

Those who will not - the more severely disabled - are not large in number. As discussed earlier, the Orange Badge scheme has over 1.5 million people in it but includes a substantial number who really should not have a badge. Of the total badges on issue 37 per cent were issued as of right with the remainder (some 945,000) issued by local authorities under discretionary criteria. In a number of local authority areas, of all badges issued to individuals, as many as 70-90 per cent have been issued under the discretionary criteria.

There are probably about 800,000 people who use wheelchairs, some of whom will use them all the time, others who will use them less often. The OPCS data shows that 12 to 13 per cent of all disabled people have a severe level of disability; equivalent to about three-quarters of a million people.

These last two figures for wheelchair users and for people with a severe level of disablement probably represent the upper limit for people who need to rely on car transport to achieve a reasonable level of personal mobility. For a variety of reasons severe disablement categories include people with sensory but not physical impairment, some wheelchair users can transfer without much difficulty - the actual number will be below this, perhaps about half the upper limit.

Four hundred thousand people spread throughout the country is not a huge number and within any one location their incidence within the total population will not be high. But for these people any misjudgement in the applications of regulations to limit the use of private cars could have serious consequences.

Although the development of policies is a matter for central government, the interpretation and implementation of those policies will be a matter for local authorities. There is some concern that because more severely disabled people are relatively few in number they may be unable to make their concerns felt at a local level, leading to local authorities inadvertently ignoring their needs.

In giving local authorities any new traffic regulatory powers .therefore, the government should ensure that the powers are accompanied by a requirement that disabled people with severe walking difficulties should not be disadvantaged by the exercise of those powers. Furthermore, in devising schemes involving pedestrianisation, the introduction of car sharing, park and ride or similar schemes, local authorities should be required to take due account of the needs of more severely disabled people.

Maintaining mobility for this sector of the population is important, not just at the personal level, but in a wider sense. No-one would wish to see a group within the population unfairly penalised even if the policies that led to that penalisation were justifiable in general terms. Equally, research has shown that maintaining or enhancing a disabled person's mobility has wider societal benefits. Without a reasonable level of mobility a disabled person is less likely to find employment and is much more likely to have to rely on a combination of state benefits and domiciliary services, none of which makes good economic sense.

Updated: 9 November 2000

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