People with disabilities and older persons must be consulted fully on future efforts to improve transport services, a conference heard last Thursday.

 

Disabled Persons Transport Advisory Committee chair Keith Richards said: “Innovators who have fantastic new ideas must always ask how a transport system and its constituent parts would look and feel if they were designed and developed by a disabled person.”

 

In some cases, he added, new ticket machines or smartphone apps are not designed, built or installed with disabled or older people in mind and have to be rectified retrospectively at great expense.

 

He gave an example of modern car park ticket machines featuring small buttons where motorists are asked for their vehicle registration. Some older people “simply don’t have the manual dexterity to manage those machines”, he noted.

 

Keith Richards also said that connected and autonomous vehicles could represent a “fantastic innovation for many disabled people” who may struggle with the first and final mile between home and public transport. But he added that for the foreseeable future many disabled people will need some degree of practical assistance from members of staff on public transport.

 

He expressed caution over the move towards driver only operated trains coupled with increasingly unstaffed stations. “Delivery of good human service can often exceed anything machines can provide and this is particularly true when it comes to giving disabled people confidence and the ability to use transport,” he remarked.

 

Keith Richards was addressing the Accessibility & Innovation Conference, held in Westminster and organised by the Department for Transport and the Transport Systems Catapult.

 

(Photo: Network Rail)