Abstract
People who use powered mobility aids such as wheelchairs and scooters need and want to use public transport. Buses are the most affordable and efficient form of public transport, capable of connecting people across local communities. However, with curbside rather than platform boarding and internal space limitations, buses also present many accessibility challenges for people using mobility aids during ingress, egress and interior maneuverability. In Australia, people using mobility aids board low floor buses that are required to comply with the national bus accessibility standard, using the front doors. A new standard was recently created to provide a Blue Label identification for powered mobility aids suitable to access public transport. The accuracy of this standard to identify mobility aids suitable to use on buses has not been verified. This research used a world-first methodology that included 3-Dimensional (3D) scanning of 35 mobility aids and 21 buses. The resulting 735 scan combinations were efficiently meshed using Meshlab, an open-source software. The research demonstrated that (i) although none of the buses were compliant with the relevant standard in 3D, many could still facilitate the boarding of a variety of mobility aids, and (ii) the Blue Label, while a valuable guide, did not accurately identifying all mobility aids that would and would not be able to board buses. This research has shortlisted nine mobility aids that can be recommended to consumers as being able to fit all the full-size buses tested. The dimensions of mobility aids that appear to enable access on most buses were also identified for consumers to consider when purchasing a mobility aid. The novel 3D meshing methodology used in this research also revealed that most collision points between mobility aids and buses occur in the curved-corridor entry of the buses. To minimize this entry problem, future bus boarding designs should consider the option of double-door entry/exit in the middle of the bus, which is common in many other countries. Adoption of this strategy would mitigate some of the challenges that people using mobility aids encounter when accessing buses, thereby increasing public transport ridership among this group.
Highlights
Conservative estimates suggest that over 1 million Australians use a 3- or 4-wheeled powered or unpowered wheelchair or mobility scooter (Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), 2016), and that every day, ∼4.3 million people in the UK (Office of Fair Trading, 2011) and 7.8 million people in the USA use wheelchairs or scooters or other mobility aids including walking sticks, crutches or walkers (La Plante and Kaye, 2010)
They reported that ramp ascent was the most difficult task for manual wheelchair users, while interior circulation was most difficult for powered mobility device users
On completion of 3D scanning, the measurements of the 35 mobility aids were recorded and are presented in Table 1, which shows if each mobility aid passed or failed the Blue Label 2D test when the test rigs were built in 3D and the mobility aid driven through as previously reported (Unsworth et al, under review)
Summary
Conservative estimates suggest that over 1 million Australians use a 3- or 4-wheeled powered or unpowered wheelchair or mobility scooter (Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), 2016), and that every day, ∼4.3 million people in the UK (Office of Fair Trading, 2011) and 7.8 million people in the USA use wheelchairs or scooters or other mobility aids including walking sticks ( called canes), crutches or walkers (La Plante and Kaye, 2010). D’Souza et al (2017a,b) investigated the effect of low-floor bus interior configuration and passenger crowding on boarding and disembarking efficiency and safety, as well as determining the effect of seating configuration and passenger load on physical accessibility They reported that ramp ascent was the most difficult task for manual wheelchair users, while interior circulation was most difficult for powered mobility device users. Bharathy and D’Souza (2018) developed an algorithm to determine the dimensions of the clear floor area required to best accommodate people in their mobility devices in buses This team used 3D coordinates from participants to derive estimates of width, height and depth of persons and their mobility aids, and clear floor space required. These accidents were more common when; boarding (6.3%) compared to alighting (2.2%), the ramp slope was greater than the maximum of 9.5◦ proposed Americans with Disabilities Act (1990), and when the ramp was deployed to street level as opposed to the sidewalk
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