Attitudes of disabled people to community transport:
Research study (carried out Nov - Dec 2002)

Attitudes towards Community Transport

How do disabled people rate community transport?

Respondents were asked how easy or difficult they find using various forms of community transport. Encouragingly, the findings suggest that those who use community transport do find it easy to use. Very few respondents say they find any of the forms of transport difficult to use, although it must be noted that the base sizes are small for this question. By comparison public transport receives a greater number of negative responses.

Q 13: For each of the forms of transport you use, how easy or difficult do you find travelling by it?

Source: MORI

Disabled people's views of community transport staff are overwhelming positive. When asked to choose a word/words which describe their image of community transport staff, the most commonly selected are 'friendly' and 'helpful' (64% and 62% respectively). The same adjectives emerge as top for bus drivers, although they are chosen by significantly fewer respondents (48% 'helpful' and 44% 'friendly'). Bus drivers however, also have a negative image among disabled people with 24% saying they are 'unhelpful', and 16% 'unfriendly' against virtually no mention of these words for community transport staff.

• Women are more positive than men about community transport staff; they are significantly more likely to say they are 'helpful', 'patient', 'friendly' and 'cheerful'. Furthermore, respondents in London are also more positive than those who live elsewhere in England and Wales.

Q 14: Here is a list of words that might be used to describe the people you would have had contact with when using different modes of transport. Please can you tick all those which describe your image of community transport staff and bus drivers?

Source: MORI

Respondents who use community transport were asked to rate each mode they use on a number of different aspects:

• availability
• cost of transport
• making travel arrangements
• personal security when travelling
• attitude of driver
• punctuality and reliability, and
• ease of access

Base sizes at these questions are small, but the results show that generally all these factors are rated as good on all forms of community transport. One aspect of Dial-a-ride that does receive a poor rating by some however is availability, but still more disabled people say this is good than poor (15 versus 5).

One aspect of community transport that is rated poorly is ease of obtaining information about services. All modes of community transport have negative net scores (indicating that more people say it is difficult than easy to get hold of information). In comparison, public transport receives a positive net score for this aspect, although it is still not very high (+4).

According to disabled people it is most difficult to obtain information about PlusBus (net score -65); related to this almost all respondents have not heard of this form of community transport as mentioned earlier. In contrast, transport provided by social services is the easiest to get information on services and is also reasonably well known.

Published: 28 June 2004

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