Empowering People with Disabilities Using Urban Public Transport

Abstract

Today's public transport is not easy to use by people that are physically impaired or suffering from mental problems. Traffic planning today is driven by online time tables calculating the optimal way to use public transport in terms of time and costs. Unfortunately, this is not suitable for a group of travelers having constraints in using vehicles, vehicle types or particular stations for health reasons. One the other hand, since most of those people are not able to drive a car on their own, making public transport available to them is a key to improve their mobility and their quality of life in general. This paper shows an approach developed within the project “mobile” funded by The German Federal Ministry of economy and energy (BMWi) that supports this kind of users while traveling by public transport. Moreover, the system takes their personal constraints into account and provides them with timely information about their trip. To this end, several supporting gadgets and a system that matches property of vehicles, stations with personal attributes of mentioned travelers are developed. This system provides the user with personalized and localized advices during travel and while travel planning. This is implemented by generation of a second graph representing the public transport network not in dimension of time and costs but in preferences and dislike of a given traveler. This second graph is an overlay to the standard graph to get a personalized graph that allows finding a suitable route respecting the constraints of the user.