Abstract
This paper presents research into the area of public transport and accessibility, addressing the support of practitioners in achieving socially inclusive solutions to the mobility issues of diverse populations. For decades, social policy has been underpinned by a stereotyping of populations into simplified sub groups: old, young, disabled, etc. and thus solutions often fail to properly address the richness of human variability. These shortcomings are often ‘managed’ through the ability for people to adapt, however, this is not a sustainable way in which to build a socially inclusive transport infrastructure. A software design tool called HADRIAN is presented. This tool provides a means to evaluate designs for their physical inclusiveness through the use of a virtual user group. This virtual user group is the embodiment of over 100 people that can be used to assess an existing or proposed design and to gain an understanding of what may be done to improve its accommodation. A case study exploring the use of the tool is described together with work in exploring the correlation of the individuals within the HADRIAN system with data on the UK population as a whole and how the inclusion or exclusion of individuals with specific characteristics can be used to inform a more representative view of the inclusiveness of a design.
Highlights
It is often stated that transport can have a direct positive impact on social inclusion by providing people with access to services such a healthcare and shopping, to Social Inclusion, 2016, Volume 4, Issue 3, Pages 7-23 help them get to a place of work, and to increase their interaction with others both on the transport itself and at their destination (Mackett, Achuthan, & Titheridge, 2008)
Informed by concerns regarding the prevalence of bus travel with older users and the number of injuries and fatalities that occur each year, feasibility research has been conducted aimed at improving safety for older public transport users (OPTU)
HADRIAN works with a digital human modelling system called SAMMIE to allow virtual users to assess the accommodation of existing or planned designs
Summary
It is often stated that transport can have a direct positive impact on social inclusion by providing people with access to services such a healthcare and shopping, to Social Inclusion, 2016, Volume 4, Issue 3, Pages 7-23 help them get to a place of work, and to increase their interaction with others both on the transport itself and at their destination (Mackett, Achuthan, & Titheridge, 2008). For many of those who are eligible for free travel, the availability of the CTP would have coincided with retirement and may have increased their bus usage regardless of free travel (Mackett, 2014) Another issue concerns safety, whilst public transport is generally considered to be safe, more than 5000 people are injured on buses and more than 300 killed or seriously injured in the UK each year and older people are over represented as bus/coach casualties (Department for Transport, 2013). For some considerable time it has been well recognised that the journey from public policy to a design solution is problematic and ideally should include causation, evaluation and instrumentation (Linder & Peters, 1984) It appears that policy makers, in the case of local authorities involved in transport planning, do not tend to innovate, but rather rely on pre-conceived solutions that focus on supply rather than demand (May, Kelly, Shepherd, & Jopson, 2012). A case study of the use of the tool is presented together with research into exploring how inclusivity explorations with individuals can be used to inform a broader understanding about accessibility for populations
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