Addressing Street Network Accessibility Inequities for Wheelchair Users in Fifteen European City Centers

Abstract

Although thirteen percent of the population living in European cities are affected by some kind of disability it is not evident whether pedestrian streetscapes efficiently support their mobility needs or more interventions are required in order to facilitate and ensure their equal access to city life and services. In this paper, we focus to people using wheelchairs and compare, in terms of accessibility, centrality measures (i.e., angular choice) for fifteen European downtown areas and for two types of networks. Namely, the city-center-wide and the wheelchair users’ street network and according to the following criteria: presence of sidewalks, pre-and-post crossing curb ramps, and efficient sidewalk width. To this end, we construct composite inequity indicators between the above types of spatial networks, based on bivariate spatial autocorrelation clustering of centrality analysis results and the share of wheelchair users’ street network per city. The findings of this work suggest that there is unequal spatial distribution between accessible and inclusive pedestrian streetscapes and thus decreased levels of centrality for people with the above disabilities are highlighted in eleven out of the fifteen studied European city centers networks.