The vital role of street design and management in reducing barriers to older peoples' mobility

Abstract

Travel encompasses a much wider environment than a journey by a person in a vehicle, thus actual travel takes place within the ‘travel environment’. Travel is very complex but it can be subdivided into three broad components: the person; the vehicle; and the built environment. Travel can only be carried out if the three components are linked by means of a ‘travel chain’ and a journey cannot be made effectively if all the links are not efficiently joined. For many mobility-impaired people the ‘travel chain’ is negated by ‘built environment barriers’. Travel is interdisciplinary and only an interdisciplinary approach can reduce barriers and increase mobility. Thus this paper is interdisciplinary in its approach to a major transport problem — the ‘unfriendly street’. Accessible buses are starting to come into operation in the United Kingdom and expectations are high that the travel of older people will increase because of these buses. The authors use recent research to challenge this belief and argue that there will be little increase in travel by older people owing to present low patronage and built environment barriers. The authors then identify major barriers to travel which make streets very unfriendly and itemize 18 barriers to access which can be removed by good design. Design parameters are presented to overcome the major problem of unfriendly surfaces in paved areas and the paper concludes by reiterating that travel for older people can only be increased by an interdiscipline approach which links ‘friendly buses’ with ‘friendly streets’.